About the Authors

Thomas G. Weiss is fighting valiantly against senior moments and creaking joints as Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies; he is also Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He was a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a past president of the International Studies Association (2009–10) as well as the recipient of its “2016 Distinguished IO Scholar Award.” Other previous posts were as Research Professor at SOAS, University of London (2012–15), Chair of the Academic Council on the UN System (2006–9), editor of Global Governance (2000–5), and Research Director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000–1). He has written extensively about multilateral approaches to international peace and security, humanitarian action, and sustainable development, and his latest single-authored books are Would the World Be Better without the UN? (2018); What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (2016); Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (2016); Governing the World? Addressing “Problems without Passports” (2014); Global Governance: Why? What? Whither? (2013); Humanitarian Business (2013); and Thinking about Global Governance: People and Ideas Matter (2011).

Rorden Wilkinson is Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Innovation, Professor of Global Political Economy, and a Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex. He has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, Brown University, and Wellesley College, and an honorary professorial post at the University of Manchester, where he was previously Professor of International Political Economy and Research Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute. In 2017–18 he was Vice-President of the International Studies Association (ISA). He is a member of the editorial board of the international public policy journal Global Governance, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the 2014 recipient of the ISA Society for Women in International Political Economy (SWIPE) Mentoring Award. He has written extensively on global governance, trade, development, and global public policy. His most recent books include What’s the Point of International Relations? (2017); What’s Wrong with the WTO and How to Fix It (2014); Trade, Poverty, Development: Getting beyond the WTO’s Doha Deadlock (2013); The Millennium Development Goals and Beyond: Global Development after 2015 (2012); and Global Governance, Poverty, and Inequality (2010).

Together, Weiss and Wilkinson edit the “Global Institutions” series for Routledge and are co-editors of International Organization and Global Governance (2nd edn, 2018).

Preface

After we assembled the final proposal for this volume in early 2017, we ran the term “global governance” though a Google search. We had done so previously and anticipated that the number of hits would be significant. Neither of us was quite ready for the 19 million that came back – 10 million more than when we edited a special section of a journal only two years earlier, and quite an astonishing number given that a quarter of a century ago the term was almost unknown. Our astonishment notwithstanding, what the results illustrated was that, for all its ubiquity, a settled understanding of global governance remains elusive. A cursory glance reveals that it is deployed in a wide variety of ways, including as an alternative moniker for international organizations; a descriptor for a global stage packed with ever more actors; a call to arms for a better world; an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of accelerating economic and social change; a synonym for world government; and a term for a perceived hegemonic plot to advance the interests of a murky global elite.

For two authors who have long worked at the coalface of what it is that we imagine global governance to be, the continuing combination of ubiquity and imprecision is a source of frustration and professional embarrassment. Rethinking Global Governance is our attempt to improve understanding in the field. It develops our 2014 International Studies Quarterly article exploring complexity, authority, power, and change in global governance and the discussion that it generated.¹ It extends the value that we identified in setting out the markers of a more analytically nourishing approach to global governance for the broader study of international relations (IR) that appeared in the journal Global Governance in 2014.² It moves forward our work on what drives change and continuity in a 2015 Ethics & International Affairs article, which appeared in a special issue that we edited.³ It moves beyond a specifically commissioned chapter that appeared in the 2016 second edition of Ken Booth and Toni Erskine’s International Relations Theory Today, which sought to probe the capacity of global governance to make sense of changed global circumstances.⁴ It advances our commitment to recapturing the normative potential of global governance that appeared in a 2015 collection entitled Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics, edited by Jamie Gaskarth.⁵ It extends our effort to consider the “everyday” experiences of the globally governed, which appeared in a 2018 issue of the journal Global Governance.⁶ And it evolves organically from and builds creatively upon our long-standing individual and joint work addressing questions of global governance and world order, including the 2018 second edition of our 55-chapter textbook International Organization and Global Governance.⁷ That said, while many of those thoughts make an appearance here, they form part of a deeper, more sustained engagement with the problematic of global governance and the journey toward its resolution that unfolds in the pages that follow.

We wanted to develop and take forward our own struggles not only because global governance remains without conceptual and analytical rigor but also because we see its normative potential ailing as a result. We were also motivated by a frustration at the tendency for scholars to fall back on the hardy perennials of IR theory for explanatory sustenance when thinking about global governance rather than developing custom-made analytical lenses or tailored theoretical frameworks.⁸ While we see great value in knowing how global governance is explained through realist, feminist, constructivist, liberal institutionalist, Marxist, post-structural, and post- and de-colonial lenses, such diversity often tells us more about myriad theoretical flowers blooming than about global governance as a phenomenon. Because as a scholarly community we have been unable to arrive at a consensus on what global governance is, we are even less likely to be able to agree – as Klaus Dingworth and Philipp Pattberg remind us – on conclusions. Their worry, and one that we have also, is that our lack of shared understanding becomes even more problematic because persistent divisions inhibit an accumulation of insights that build upon one another and advance genuine comprehension.⁹

The result is that we have ceased to expand the boundaries of our understanding and have left unrealized the prescriptive potential that global governance could generate to provide better answers to genuine puzzles about world order as well as solutions to real-world problems. Indeed, the best that we can muster is that global governance is a catch-all label designed to indicate the highest level of analysis.¹⁰ It is seldom applied to generate incisive understandings of how the world is ordered and governed or how it could be reorganized to bring about progressive change worldwide. It is little wonder that we are hardly further advanced in answering the question that Lawrence Finkelstein provocatively posed almost twenty-five years ago – “What is global governance?” His answer was “Virtually anything.”¹¹

Rethinking Global Governance seeks to attenuate confusion by reclaiming the term’s unrealized analytical value and rescuing its normative potential. Our argument is that global governance must move from a simple association with the actions and activities of international organizations and their subsidiaries to a set of questions that probe the intricate and multifaceted manner in which the world is governed and ordered at a given moment in time. Only then will we find theoretically nourishing and empirically satisfying interpretations. We claim that these questions have the potential to generate better understandings of the complex elements that combine to produce distinctive world orders and that enable us to see how the world has been, is, and will be governed; account for the different systems of global governance that have existed across time and space as well as explore their peculiarities; comprehend the forces that have driven and continue to drive continuity and change in patterns of global governance and that propel stability and transformation, overlap, and ambiguity; and oblige us to examine the manner in which global governance is experienced by recipients through discovering what it is like to be on its receiving end.

Our purpose is not to advance a singular theory, because we are still asking first-order questions. Our own view is that we are at too early a stage in the process of refinement to attempt such an endeavor, though a recent laudable attempt has been made to do just that.¹² Instead, Rethinking Global Governance highlights the utility of continuing to ask questions and – just as crucially – of harnessing the normative potential of the answers for designing and helping implement better global governance. Ours is thus a plea for an urgent reconceptualization, which is stimulated by two distinct motivations: first, in an age of resurgent populism and nationalism – of which Trumpism and Brexit are two prominent illustrations – both the planet itself and the normative project of progressive global change are in peril;¹³ and, second, as Craig Murphy aptly summarized, global governance remains “poorly done and poorly understood.”¹⁴

We are grateful for thoughtful comments from three reviewers; the role of our fellow global governance scholars in sharpening our own thinking in numerous scholarly environs; the professionalism and good humor of Louise Knight, Nekane Tanaka Galdos, and the team at Polity Press; long car journeys, global airways, digital communication technologies, fine wine and craft beer; and the absences that our families have endured that made this volume possible. We would like to claim in particular that Priscilla Read and Claire Annesley have been patient in dealing with our obsession to get global governance right, or at least better. The mistakes, as always, are our own.

TGW and RW

New York and Brighton

July 2018

Notes

8. See Alice Ba and Matthew J. Hoffmann (eds), Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence, Contestation and World Order (London: Routledge, 2005); and the contributions by Jason Charrette and Jennifer Sterling-Folker, “Realism,” Christer Jönsson, “Classical Liberal Internationalism,” Tana Johnson and Andrew Heiss, “Liberal Institutionalism,” Duncan Snidal and Henning Tamm, “Rational Choice and Principal-Agent Theory,” Susan Park, “Constructivism,” Robert W. Cox, “Critical Theory,” Julian Germann, “Marxism,” Susanne Zwingel, Elisabeth Prügl, and Gülay Caglar, “Feminism,” James Brassett, “Post-Structuralism,” and Jacquelin Kataneksza, L. H. M. Ling, and Sara Shroff, “Decoloniality: (Re)Making Worlds,” in International Organization and Global Governance, ed. Weiss and Wilkinson, pp. 91–218.