Criticizing Global Governance

The essays in this collection seek to reflect on global governance and to provide a better critical understanding of the various practices that fall under its rubric. The first part challenges the concept of global governance, the second part focuses on organizational and institutional aspects, and the last part examines the rule systems implemented by global governance practices. The vocabulary of (global) governance has become a serious contender to imagine world order in the post cold war world. Using different strategies of critique, the contributors argue that global governance denotes a political vocabulary where acts of definition themselves are political moves.

Nine well-known authors associated with the world federalist movement critique the 1995 Report of the Commission on Global Governance entitled Our Global Neighborhood. Although the contributors manifest a variety of viewpoints, styles, and approaches, they are unanimous in condemning the Report as insufficiently imaginative and visionary. Despite repeated calls in the Commission Report for a radically new way of thinking, the substance of the Report mindlessly rubber-stamps the legitimacy of the sovereign nation-state system of today, by means of summarily and peremptorily dismissing even the possibility of a supernational government qualitatively beyond the United Nations. According to the contributors, the concept of genuine world government is sufficiently advanced, and the circumstances of the present day are conducive, so that this concept is deserving of the most careful and serious attention by the general public and the political leadership. Despite their unconventional conclusions, these essays are lucid, judicious, and commanding.

Showcases diverse theoretical approaches in the emerging area of global governance.

This book provides critical perspectives on the role of global institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This collection presents Thomas G. Weiss' most important contributions to debates on UN Reform, non-state actors and global governance and humanitarian action in a turbulent world.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Institut für Politikwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Globalisation and Global Governance, language: English, abstract: [...] Clearly, the paper revolves around the normative concept of global governance. While in scientific literature, the normative concept of global governance has become unfashionable by the time and a rather critical analysis of the implication of international regulation has taken precedence, it will be outlined that there is good reason to investigate the connection between the UN and the normative concept. By no means does this foreclose the importance of critical scrutiny of the establishing governance architecture. The criticism of global governance as the perpetuation of neoliberal hegemony and Western domination is acknowledged but will not be dealt with from this point on. Surprisingly little effort been made so far to systematically link the concept of global governance, be it normative or analytical, to the United Nations system although on a gut level, scholars seem to agree that both are somehow linked. At the start of the analysis, this paper sets out to present a first useful framework put forth by Brühl and Rosert (Brühl/Rosert 2007) and adds a missing category to the analysis, the link between the UN and the normative concept of global governance. In the normative tradition, the developed framework inter alia proposes to consider the UN as a potential activator for global governance as a normative concept. While the connection of global governance and the UN as its activator offers room for gripping research, the ambition of this paper is much downgraded. It only seeks to offer a starting point by investigating whether the UN can actually advance global governance and tries to enable a first cautious approach to the more general hypothesis above. To facilitate this analysis, in a first step a major problem of global governance is selected. The fundamental lack of integration of non-state actors into governance structures serves as a case in point for that matter. The legitimacy of global governance suffers from this lack which in turn impedes reaping the desired benefits of the concept. In a second step, the UN’s capacity to solve the depicted problem is analysed. [...]

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.