The Limits of Global Governance: Transnational Neopluralism in a Complex World (original) (raw)
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Global governance consists of a set of institutions, procedures and networks that jointly influence collective decision making (agreements, regulations, specific choices) necessary to tackle global challenges. The need to manage problems of global nature – to govern globally – is generated by globalization processes. Globalization gradually but irreversibly undermines the once-exclusive position of nation states, which (voluntarily or involuntarily) surrender a substantial part of their informal as well as formal decision-making authority to superior international or supranational structures. Regional political and economic organizations, but also non-governmental organizations, the mass media and supranational economic corporations are thus gaining more influence in the international arena. The study focuses on analyzing the position of individual actors in the global governance process. It reaches the conclusion that, despite being so numerous and diverse, the above-mentioned acto...
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ABSTRACT Global governance remains notoriously slippery. While the term arose to describe change in the late twentieth century, its association with that specific moment has frozen it in time and deprived it of analytical utility. It has become an alternative moniker for international organizations, a descriptor for an increasingly crowded world stage, a call to arms, an attempt to control the pernicious aspects of globalization, and a synonym for world government. This article aims not to advance a theory of global governance but to highlight where core questions encourage us to go. A more rigorous conception should help us understand the nature of the contemporary phenomenon as well as look “backwards” and “forwards.” Such an investigation should provide historical insights as well as prescriptive elements to understand the kind of world order that we ought to be seeking and encourage us to investigate how that global governance could be realized.
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With its emphasis on formal and informal governance as well as different types of power and authority other than rational-legal, the ambivalent and notoriously vague narrative of global governance has gained disciplinary celebrity in International Relations. More specifically, it raised the question of agency in a broader sense as it remains to be determined which entities can serve as ‘global governors’. Unfortunately, much of this discussion is framed in substantial terms as global governance continues to advance an ‘add new actors and stir’ approach. Drawing on individualistic ontologies, actors in global governance are oftentimes portrayed as singular elements, acting as unified, bounded, and self-directed entities. Against such a background, the paper advances the notion that governance is never conducted by just one actor. Configurations of governance hence can be considered as the very interaction in which agency is constituted in the first place. Drawing on relationism as we...
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Prompted by both promises and pitfalls in Michael's Zürn's A Theory of Global Governance, this paper reflects on challenges going forward beyond liberal institutionalism in the study of world politics. Six suggestions are particularly highlighted for future theorizing of global governance: (a) further distance from state-centrism; (b) greater attention to transscalar qualities of global governing; (c) more incorporation of social-structural aspects of global regulation; (d) trilateral integration of individual, institutional, and structural sources of legitimacy in global governance; (e) more synthesis of positive and normative analysis; and (f) transcendence of Euro-centrism. Together these six shifts would generate a transformed global governance theory – and possibly practice as well.
RETHINKING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: FROM GLOBAL GOVERNANCE TO TRANSNATIONAL NEOPLURALISM
Originally focused on seeking policy solutions through international cooperation, transnational administration, and global governance, the study of global environmental policy has become increasingly diverse and fragmented. Complex, crosscutting variables ranging from a wider constellation of non-state actors to diverse critical perspectives, along with a focus on narrower sub-fields and the changing nature of environmental challenges themselves, have left the field in a state of flux. A broader, more process-oriented explanatory framework is needed. Institutionalist, global governance and civil society approaches, as well as middle-range concepts such as policy networks, are insufficient, while critical analyses, although a step in the right direction, are overly deterministic. Transnational neopluralism, which focuses on struggles for power and influence among material interest groups, social movements, and political actors in diverse issue-areas, provides a more robust framework for developing a more insightful research agenda and more constructive policy-making strategies in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. Global governance approaches in particular are flawed, while attempts to move away from that paradigm are partial and fragmented. In this article we argue that the underlying structure of constraints and opportunities in the international system, as understood through the prism of transnational neopluralism, continues to stymie attempts at developing effective global policy and transnational administration in the environmental issue-area. Transnational neopluralism focuses not on the more institutional or managerial dimensions of public policy such as global governance, neoinstitutionalism or policy network analysis, but rather on the dynamic interaction – the ongoing conflict, competition, manipulation and jockeying for influence – of specific sets of actors in key policy-making processes. The neopluralist approach not only analyses uneven and shifting power relationships among interest groups and 'value groups' (Key 1953) but also brings in regularized relationships between those groups and state and intergovernmental actors in diverse, structurally differentiated issue-areas. Rather than seeing institutional structure as the main independent variable, neopluralist analysis looks at the political processes that characterize diverse issue-areas and the key actors that interact within them – their objectives, resources, strategies and tactics, both explicit and implicit.