Diffusion of power and multiplexed governance: evolving networks and clusters for global governance of AI infrastructures

Global ocean governance is the concretization of global governance. Various interest groups interact with and coordinate ocean issues. Global ocean governance is inevitably linked to the new global governance landscape. In recent years, a series of new scenarios in global governance have emerged. These situations have further shaped the plurality of participants and the diversity of mechanisms in global ocean governance. Science and technology innovation and application are prerequisites and prime movers for the evolution of global ocean governance. Major worldwide crises, represented by global climate change and the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, have added great uncertainty to the future development of global ocean governance. The divergence of interests and positions between emerging countries and developed countries, as well as the reshaping of the global geopolitical landscape in recent years, has led to the stagnation or deadlock of a series of international negotiations and international cooperation platforms related to global ocean governance. With the deepening of global governance, non-state actors are not only objects of ocean governance but also bearers of legal obligations and enjoy varying degrees of legal rights, participating in agenda setting, rule construction, and monitoring implementation at different levels of ocean governance. From a critical jurisprudence perspective, in the practice of global ocean governance, the relationship between non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations is more likely to be one of reconciliation than the “state–civil society” dichotomy of moral imagination. This new set of circumstances exposes the divisive and fragmented nature of global ocean governance. This study concludes that the new situation of global ocean governance constitutes a historic opportunity for countries to reexamine the role of the rule of law during the Anthropocene to bridge the fragmentation and gaps in mechanisms and achieve a truly integrated, holistic, and closely nested global ocean governance. The question of how to implement the rule of law requires the introduction of theoretical perspectives such as the Anthropocene, complex systems theory, and the community of a shared future for humanity to undertake a fundamental critical reflection and rethinking of global ocean governance.

This paper proposes a theoretical account of institutional transformation and the emergence of order in global inter-organisational relations, which is centred on the concept of “metagovernance”. It does so by theorising on the advent of governance architectures in global health governance—relationships between international organisations (IOs) in this field that are stable over time. Global health governance is routinely portrayed as an exceptionally fragmented field of international cooperation with a perceived lack of synergy and choreography between international and transnational organisations. However, our paper starts from the observation that there are also movements of convergence between international organisations. We seek to explain these by looking at the effects of international norms that define good global governance as <em>orderly and harmonised </em>global governance. We conceptualize such norms as “metagovernance norms” that are enacted in reflexive practices which govern and order the relationships between international organisations. Empirically, this paper traces changing interactions and institutional arrangements between IOs (World Health Organization; World Bank; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) in global health governance since the late 1940s and shows how patterns therein reflect and (re)produce broader discursive perceptions of what “health” is about and how the governance thereof ought to be organised.

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a technological upheaval with the potential to change human society. Because of its transformative potential, AI is increasingly becoming subject to regulatory initiatives at the global level. Yet, so far, scholarship in political science and international relations has focused more on AI applications than on the emerging architecture of global AI regulation. The purpose of this article is to outline an agenda for research into the global governance of AI. The article distinguishes between two broad perspectives: an empirical approach, aimed at mapping and explaining global AI governance; and a normative approach, aimed at developing and applying standards for appropriate global AI governance. The two approaches offer questions, concepts, and theories that are helpful in gaining an understanding of the emerging global governance of AI. Conversely, exploring AI as a regulatory issue offers a critical opportunity to refine existing general approaches to the study of global governance.

This article examines the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on international relations (IR) and global governance. It begins by presenting a conceptual framework that situates AI within the theoretical and practical dimensions of IR, and explores how AI influences global power dynamics, alters state behaviour, and reshapes institutional frameworks. The study highlights the ethical and regulatory challenges of AI governance, focusing first on the efforts of the United Nations (UN), the Council of Europe and the European Union (EU). Later, the article discusses the "AI technology race" between the United States and China and their regulations. Finally, the article highlights the need for ethical and responsible AI development to foster global cooperation and address the challenges and opportunities that this technology presents in contemporary international relations.

Drawing on a long‐term political ethnography of sites of global health governance, the paper makes methodological and substantive contributions. First of all, it shows that ethnography induces researchers to experience international organizations (IOs) and global governance as spatiotemporal phenomena. This experience overlaps with the lived realities of practitioners and spotlights aspects that are otherwise easily overlooked. Both practitioners and ethnographers have to be in specific spaces at particular times. This practical challenge illustrates that there are focal times and spaces, which are linked to the cyclical and sited character of global health governance. These focal times and spaces provide an important coordination mechanism and ease the general flow of knowledge – within IOs and between IOs and their environment. However, there is also the constant danger that they develop a self‐referential life of their own and become disconnected from other processes. Similarly, not just researchers but also practitioners are struggling to develop a comprehensive understanding of IOs since they experience them only partially and in specific settings. Thus, a spatiotemporal account highlights both overlooked links and unexpected disconnections. The conclusion mentions that the current – COVID‐19‐induced – mainstreaming of digital technologies will impact the spatiotemporal dimension of global health governance.

Reviewed by: Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World by Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin Matheus de Carvalho Hernandez (bio) and Inga T. Winkler (bio) Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin, Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780190672676, 614 Pages. Institutions matter. This is the key message of the volume on Human Rights in Global Health edited by Benjamin Meier and Lawrence Gostin. With a renewed and comprehensive vision of human rights after the end of the Cold War and wide-ranging calls for entering the era of implementation of human rights,1 the inextricable link between human rights and global health has become generally accepted. Global health issues demand complex solutions, solutions that depend on a range of actors. They depend on global health governance. The encounter between these two realms—human rights and global health—places international institutions in the center of dynamics, demonstrating their strategic role for the realization of the right to health. The volume's main goal is to evaluate the connections between public health, global governance, and human rights. It presents a vast array of international organizations based on a broad understanding of global health, ranging from the WHO, to organizations in the UN system, to organizations focused on economic governance, to the UN human rights system. While States remain the primary duty-bearers for the realization of human rights, international organizations have a significant influence and such a wide definition of global health governance is appropriate for the multilevel and multi-stakeholder nature of the issue. It acknowledges that a broad range of organizations (including those whose mandate is not originally linked to global health) indeed have an impact on global health.2 The result of this immense analytical effort is a volume with over 600 pages, five sections, and twenty-four chapters that bring together forty-six authors, including many key experts in the health and human rights field. The first section provides the theoretical, historical, and conceptual basis regarding the relevance of human rights for global health, especially the rights-based approach to health. Chapter Three defines global governance for health as "the structures and methods of governing public health through multi-level and multisectoral institutions, including the actors and norms that define global health in an increasingly globalized [End Page 1045] world,"3 and discusses the role of human rights in influencing these governance processes. The section concludes with a forward-looking chapter on the need to reform global health governance in order to realize human rights in the sustainable development era (and the SDGs also feature prominently in other chapters). The second section is devoted to the World Health Organization (WHO) as the main specialized agency for global health. The authors explore the political and internal constraints and resistance to rights-based approaches inside the WHO. The section also assesses the current Gender, Equity, and Human Rights mainstreaming processes and analyzes the strategic position of the WHO in the future of global health governance. The third section discusses the different approaches of the UN agencies, funds, and programs to mainstreaming human rights into global health. The chapters are dedicated to analyzing each organization (UNICEF, ILO, UNESCO, UNFPA, FAO, and UNAIDS) within their respective mandates and their efforts to promote a human rights-based approach to global health. The section demonstrates how these UN entities have been seeking (with different levels of success) to implement Kofi Annan's appeal to mainstream human rights in all their practices. The final forward-looking chapter of the section (Chapter Fourteen focuses on the role of organizational partnerships for health and human rights. As it is impossible to delink human rights mainstreaming from development cooperation, the welcome fourth section goes beyond institutions that consider global health as the core of their mandate and approaches global economic governance institutions and funding agencies. The chapters critically discuss the role of these institutions in integrating human rights into their recommendations on economic reform and poverty reduction. Following an introductory chapter on the integration of the human rights-based approach and the right to development into global governance to health, the...

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The global governance of artificial intelligence (AI) depends on coordination among national governments, international organizations, and non‐state actors. While existing research has mapped the institutional complexity of the emerging AI regime, public trust in the stakeholders involved remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap using parallel surveys in the United States and China, two leading AI powers locked in strategic rivalry. Results show that respondents in both countries express the highest levels of trust in their own government and the lowest in their geopolitical rival, with other actors such as the European Union, tech firms, and research institutes falling in between. These patterns reflect how geopolitical competition and intergroup dynamics shape public trust, posing challenges for inclusive and cooperative governance in contested global domains such as AI. At the same time, individuals who view AI as socially beneficial and who support international cooperation report higher trust across a broad set of actors, including rivals. These findings illuminate systematic patterns in public opinions that condition the political viability of global AI governance and suggest that narratives emphasizing shared benefits and collaboration may help bridge trust gaps.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform the contemporary global order, its governance has emerged as a paramount challenge at the intersection of technological innovation and institutional frameworks, marked distinctively by the ascendance of Big Tech companies as formidable new actors in the international arena. This paper examines how Big Tech companies are reshaping global AI governance landscapes through their unprecedented technological capabilities and market influence. While existing literature acknowledges the growing authority of non-state actors in global governance, limited attention has been paid to the distinct mechanisms through which Big Tech companies influence AI governance dynamics. Drawing on new institutional theory and its three-pillar framework, this study develops an integrated analytical framework to investigate three key mechanisms: regulative, normative, and cognitive. Using theory-testing process tracing methodology and taking Google as a critical case study, this research systematically analyzes how Big Tech companies leverage their technological resource endowments, self-regulatory practices, and epistemic authority to influence global AI governance. The findings reveal that Big Tech companies significantly shape governance outcomes through: (1) embedding technical feasibility parameters in formal regulations and standards through strategic deployment of expertise; (2) establishing normative authority through self-regulatory innovations that diffuse globally via multilateral platforms; and (3) shaping shared frameworks of meaning that define how governance challenges are conceptualized and addressed. This study contributes to both global governance and public management literature by theorizing Big Tech’s distinct role as super-sized non-state actors and demonstrating how new institutional theory can illuminate governance dynamics beyond national boundaries.

The global landscape is undergoing a profound transformation driven by artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that has the potential to reshape global power dynamics, economies, and societies. The United States (U.S.) has historically played a central role in guiding technological advancements, offering leadership that has prioritized ethical governance and global stability. Drawing a parallel to the U.S. leadership during the development of atomic weapons, this study emphasizes the necessity for the U.S. to take a proactive and responsible role in the governance of AI. Without U.S. leadership, the proliferation of AI risks falling into the hands of authoritarian regimes, such as China and Russia, whose use of AI for surveillance, censorship, disinformation, and military purposes could destabilize international norms and threaten democratic values. The study uses agency theory to argue that the global community must rely on the U.S. as a responsible agent to ensure AI technologies are used ethically and for the collective benefit of humanity. The paper also incorporates social comparison theory, technological determinism, and international relations realism to further illustrate the strategic and moral imperative of U.S. leadership in AI governance. By examining the historical context of U.S. leadership in managing disruptive technologies, this study highlights the urgent need for the U.S. to establish global AI governance frameworks that prioritize human rights, equity, and democratic values, countering the risks posed by authoritarian misuse of AI. Overall, the study employs a systematic meta-analysis, utilizing agency theory and complementary frameworks such as social comparison theory, technological determinism, and realism to analyze the U.S.'s role in global AI governance, drawing from peer-reviewed literature sourced from databases like Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science, published between 2010 and 2025. The analysis reveals that U.S. leadership in AI prioritizes ethical development, transparency, and international collaboration, contrasting sharply with China and Russia’s authoritarian strategies focused on surveillance, militarization, and disinformation, underscoring the urgent need for U.S.-led global norms to ensure AI aligns with democratic values and fosters global stability.

The rise of non-state (international, private, and transnational) actors in global politics has far-reaching consequences for foreign policy theory and practice. In order to be able to explain foreign policy in the 21st century, foreign policy research needs to take into account the growing importance of nonstate actorss. A good way to do this would be to engage the literature on globalization and global governance. Both fields would benefit from such an exchange of ideas because their respective strengths could cancel out each other’s weaknesses. Foreign policy research, on the one hand, has a strong track record explaining foreign policy outcomes, using a broad range of theoretical concepts, but almost completely ignores non-state actors. This is highly problematic for at least two reasons: first, foreign policy is increasingly made in international organizations and intergovernmental and transnational governance networks instead of national institutions like foreign ministries. Second, the latter increasingly open up to, and involve, non-state actors in their policymaking procedures. Thus, if foreign policy research wants to avoid becoming marginalized in the future, it needs to take into account this change. However, systemic approaches like neorealism or constructivism have difficulties adapting to the new reality of foreign policy. They stress the importance of states at the expense of non-state actors, which are only of marginal interest to them, as is global governance. Moreover, they also conceptualize states as unitary actors, which forecloses the possibility of examining the involvement of non-state actors in states’ decision-making processes. Agency-based approaches such as foreign policy analysis (FPA) fare much better, at least in principle. FPA scholars stress the importance of disaggregating the state and looking at the individuals and group dynamics that influence their decision-making. However, while this commitment to opening up the state allows for a great deal more flexibility vis-à-vis different types of actors, FPA research has so far remained state-centric and only very recently turned to non-state actors. On the other hand, non-state actors’ involvement in policymaking is the strong suit of the literature on globalization and global governance, which has spent a lot of time and effort analyzing various forms of “hybrid” governance. At the same time, however, this literature has been rather descriptive, so far mainly systematizing different governance arrangements and the conditions under which non-state actors are included in governance arrangements. This literature could profit from foreign policy research’s rich theoretical knowledge in explaining policy outcomes in hybrid governance networks and international organizations (IOs). Foreign policy researchers should take non-state actors seriously. In this regard, three avenues in particular are relevant for future research: (1) comparative empirical research to establish the extent of non-state actors’ participation in foreign policymaking across different countries and governance arrangements; (2) explanatory studies that analyze the conditions under which non-state actors are involved in states’ foreign policymaking processes; and (3) the normative implications of increased hybrid foreign policymaking for democratic legitimacy.

Global governance is one of the major phenomena of the world politics; however, approaches to tackle the problems of global governance or governing globalization are approved or verified by all sides. The main question of the current research is: Do International Organizations have an agreed approach for the problems of governing globalization or global governance? Despite that the states and in somehow the international organizations are part of the problems, however, one of the approaches to deal with global governance is international organizations. This study uses the comparative approach and document analysis. This part analyses the relevant articles and documents which have articulated internationally to deal with the problems of global governance. This research is an effort to analyze the role of the international organization’s approach to the problems of governing globalizations. There have been many problems in the world, thus this research is unable to emphasis on all of them. It would be concluded that the international organization’s approach to deal with the problems of governing globalization is not adequate and poses shortcomings. In addition, the international organizations are unable to have an approach upon-agreed on to deal with the challenges which the humanity is facing.

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the place of the global governance concept in four international relations theories: realism, liberalism, neoliberal institutionalism and social constructivism. Global governance is defined as the sum of ways that institutions and international organizations, both public and private, use to try to cooperate at the global level in order to manage their common affairs. In addition, the paper defines global governance as being a specific perspective on world politics that offers a tool for understanding global change in an era of shifting boundaries and relocated authorities. The main research questions of the article are: how the most influential IR theories have reacted to the global governance concept and why the term ‘global governance’, so popularly and so frequently used in the 1990’s, has not resulted in a stable concept. Conclusions and suggestions presented in the summary point out that global governance held the promise of a radical transformation (predicted by almost every IR theory) of world order at the end of the Cold War. However, this great institutional transformation has never taken place. Therefore, current global politics still remain resistant to any form of world (or global) governance.

Scrutinizing environmental governance in a digital age: New ways of seeing, participating, and intervening

A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Biermann, Frank. 2012. Greening the United Nations Charter: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. May / June 2012. A constitutional turn is needed to bring the UN system in line with the urgent needs of planetary stewardship and earth system governance in the 21st century. Yet how this could be organized in practice remains a challenge and subject to political and scholarly debate. This paper contributes to this debate by outlining four reforms of the UN system that would advance global decision-making by addressing major shortcomings in the current system: Lack of integration of economic and environmental policies in the UN system; institutional fragmentation and weakness of the environmental pillar of sustainable development; lack of high-level regulatory competence and oversight regarding areas beyond national jurisdiction; and insufficient integration of scientific insights into political decision-making. The reforms proposed would together create an Earth Alliance in the UN system, consisting of a high-level UN Sustainable Development Council, a World Environment Organization, a UN Trusteeship Council for Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, and an UN Global Environmental Assessment Commission.