Democratizing Global Governance (original) (raw)
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Prospects of Deliberative Global Governance
Global governance is often equated with international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank that were established after World War II to address problems transcending national borders. While these institutions incorporate norms of representative democracy that evolved in national societies, their legitimacy is often questioned on grounds of limited effectiveness and remoteness from the citizens they purportedly serve. The arguments of many democratic theorists that deliberation among ordinary citizens can legitimize policies that heed these views thus bear important implications for global governance. In this paper, the possibility and different ways that civil society enhancing public participation, transparency and accountability in global governance are addressed. The empirical focus will be on the world's first global deliberation-WWViews (world wide views on global warming) that was held in 38 countries with all inhabited continents in 2009. The social drivers that encourage innovation in global democratic governance are analysed, as the main successes and challenges of WWViews and sketch three scenarios of the future of deliberative global governance are based on the experiences and plans around global citizen participation. The authors argue that despite some challenges, such as ensuring high quality of deliberation in highly variant policy cultural contexts and building policy pathways conducive to political impact, the prospects of deliberation in helping solve global environmental and policy problems are high, and likely to see cumulative progress in the near future.
During the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations consulted worldwide nearly ten million people for their views. Such proliferating megaconsultations are often uncritically accepted as a remedy for an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental institutions. We argue, however, that the potential of civil society consultations to democratize global governance is constrained by the limited legitimacy of these consultations in the first place. Global consultations regularly fail to include civil society actors from developing countries, or show other sociodemographic biases. Also, they often fail to strengthen accountability between citizens, international organizations and governments. In this article, we investigate the causes of this phenomenon by exploring the relationship between the design of consultations and their democratic legitimacy. The basis for our argument is an in-depth empirical study of three consultations carried out during the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals. We find that design is an important variable to explain the overall legitimacy of consultations. Yet its exact role is sometimes unexpected. Extensive material resources and open access conditions do not systematically enhance the legitimacy of the studied consultations. Instead, developing clear objectives, allocating sufficient time to participants, and formally binding the consultation to the negotiations hold considerably more promise.
Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly
2011
There is widespread recognition of a democratic deficit in global governance. While recognizing this deficit is easy, remedying it is going to be hard. Many existing proposals for global democratization are not very imaginative in that they begin from the assumption that the model for global democracy already exists in something like the form already taken by developed liberal democracies. One of the more prominent such models is the 'popularly elected global assembly' or PEGA. We accept the basic justifications for global democracy advanced by PEGA campaigners, but believe there is a need to move beyond facile invocations of electoral democracy at the global level. We examine the contribution to the development of global deliberative democracy that could be made by Deliberative Global Citizens' Assemblies of ordinary citizens drawn from all the countries of the world. Such assemblies would be both deliberative and composed of ordinary citizens of the world -not elected politicians. We do not proclaim this kind of innovation as the solution to the problem of effective and democratically legitimate global governance. Rather, we call for its exploration as a complement to existing international institutions and a focal point for global deliberative systems.
The Virtuous Cycle: A New Paradigm for Democratizing Global Governance Through Deliberation
International Institutions: Politics of International Institutions & Global Governance eJournal, 2008
This paper offers a new approach to democratic representation in global governance. Given the democratic deficit crisis of global governance institutions, questions on whether and how international civil society groups could strengthen democracy within international institutions are at the crux of current debates on global governance. A common premise suggests that that the incorporation of international civil society into global governance would result in the representation of a broader array of interests in the global arena. The article questions this premise, drawing on the experience of the International Labor Organization (ILO), the organization that has had the longest and deepest formal engagement with civil society groups. The article analyzes the Tripartite Structure of the ILO, the norm of freedom of association and recent reform to the ILO's Credential Committee. Drawing on this analysis, it advances an alternative paradigm for democratizing global governance, that of...
Deliberative Democracy and the Challenge of Global Governance
globernance.com
Nearly 10 years ago, in his essay "Governing the Globe" (Walzer 2004: 171-91) Michael Walzer analyzed a number of prospective developments of the world order in the 21 st century and outlined what to his mind is the most desirable alternative: a complex picture which involves curbing anarchy while at the same time preserving diversity entirely. I will defend Walzer's view as the embodiment of the best liberal view of cosmopolitan arrangements. In fact, in the same spirit as Rawls's Law of Peoples (1999b), Walzer's view is undergirded by the assumption that there's nothing more anti-liberal than the idea that a just world will come into being solely when every human being on earth will turn into a liberal.
Deliberation and Global Civil Society: Agency Arena Affect
The article provides a critical analysis of the role and function of global civil society within deliberative approaches to global governance. It critiques a common view that global civil society can/should act as an agent for democratising global governance and seeks to explore the importance of global civil society as an arena of deliberation. This more reconstructive aim is supplemented by an empirically focused discussion of the affective dimensions of global civil society, in general, and the increasingly important use of film, in particular. Ultimately, this then yields an image of the deliberative politics of global civil society that is more reflective of the differences, ambiguities and contests that pervade its discourses about global governance. This is presented as a quality that debates about deliberative global governance might learn from as well as speak to.
Deliberative democracy and climate governance
Nature Human Behaviour, 2019
Against those who advocate simplistic authoritarian solutions to the climate challenge 1 , we argue for democracy's revitalization through harnessing the latent wisdom of citizens and joining that wisdom more effectively to relevant expertise and political authority. Skeptics argue that weaknesses in mass political cognition warrant elite governance. In contrast, we argue that it is the way the political process is constructed that affects how citizens engage and behave on issues such as climate change, and that if constructed properly citizens reveal competence that enables them to play key roles in governance. Effective response can be enhanced by deliberative democratic principles and practices. This includes institutions that promote genuine deliberation among citizens and leaders rather than posturing and strategic language, together with mechanisms to link deliberation with decision making. A concerted effort along these lines to reimagine governance at different scales can better equip us to meet the challenges of climate change.