Global Governance and Innovation 2020: how to Govern the Complexities of the Future

Abstract

In the past two years, many warnings had been launched by the scientific community and global governance experts on the extremely dangerous and unpredictable earthquake consequences, which was showing its first premonitory shock waves, in the economic, financial and political international order. In Spring 2008, at Shanghai University, the Dean of the School of International Relations, Yu Chen Sang, and the Dean of the Faculty of Economics of Rome Tor Vergata University, Michele Bagella, representing the Rector, signed an agreement to launch the second edition of the Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance (YICGG), inviting me to coordinate the research program and the two conclusive weeks in Rome. I had in mind to focus the research of the young participants and the lectures delivered by professors and experts against the backdrop of the economic, financial and political crisis which in the meantime had erupted. It was neither the year 1929, which many ‘‘guardians’’ of the past hastily tried to evoke, nor the periodic negative cycle of 1999 or the regional financial crises witnessed in the last decades, especially after 1989. Every speculation or search for comforting parallel developments has been crushed by the crude reality. And so the title of the 2008 edition of the Research Competition ‘‘Global Governance and Innovation 2020’’ was found appropriate. This concept will be maintained as an introduction title to future editions, starting from the imminent 2009 event. The impending change of the international order and the main players and factors determining policies and strategic choices, which once was an absolute monopoly of nation-states, empires and hegemonies, has shown itself with the dawn of a planetary era. It will be a very engaging age because it will require acceptance of the