Forum: Global Governance: Decline or Maturation of an Academic Concept?

Abstract

This forum discusses contemporary scholarship on global governance in light of various problems that have commonly been associated with the global governance concept and literature. In the first contribution, Henk Overbeek maintains that global governance talk has undergone a profound transformation. While the concept initially referred to a radical restructuring of the global economic order, it is nowadays used as a reformist concept that seeks to accommodate the interests of neo-liberal globalization with relatively marginal reforms that are seen as necessary to keep the system running. Because definitions of global governance, including that of the Commission on Global Governance, tend to presuppose rather than question the existence of common interests and the willingness to cooperate at the global level, they serve to depoliticize the debate about world order. Moreover, the concept is analytically misleading given the rise of traditional forms of interstate bargaining that followed both the global financial crisis and the rise of the BRIC states. In the second contribution, Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg revisit the common critique that ‘‘global governance’’ is essentially a misnomer, as it overestimates the actual globality of existing governance schemes and as it portrays transboundary regulation as a mostly apolitical or post-political activity. Finding some truth in both claims, the authors however note that the more recent contributions to the global governance literature are very much aware of these conceptual challenges and frequently manage to address them without depriving the concept of global governance of its particular strengths. However, the authors identify a third challenge that has largely gone unnoticed thus far, namely the tendency of global governance research to almost exclusively focus on densely regulated policy areas while at the same time neglecting the more fundamental question why some issues become considered global governance issues and others not.