Global Governance and Human Development: Promoting Democratic Accountability and Institutional Experimentation

Abstract

This paper identifies two elements for global governance critical to the pursuit of human development: democratic accountability and institutional experimentation. The paper stresses the critical importance of organizing effective global institutions for the purpose of human development and briefly discusses some major challenges that can and do affect the international community. It summarizes the theoretical underpinnings for the primacy of institutions as derived from two strands of development theory and the extent towards which these ideas have been acted upon in developing frameworks of global governance. The paper discusses these two principles in light of some of the major challenges that can and do affect the international community as a whole, and some of the decentralized forms of governance that are being developed as developing countries assert themselves in debates on institutional organization. It focuses on the global financial crisis as a case study in the inadequacies of current global governance and the reforms advocated by the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System to redress these failures.