Global Governance: Looking Ahead, 2006–2010

Abstract

As is customary, new journal editors open their term of office with statement of visions and aspirations for the journal that they have undertaken to promote. The following statement sets out the aims, conceptions, and practices that the incoming editorial team brings to Global Governance. Before setting out our own stall, however, we must acknowledge and applaud the excellent work of our predecessors. In just ten years, the initial two editorial partnerships have created in Global Governance world-class venue for intellectual and policy debates about one of the key political issues of our time--that of managing more world. Our editorship faces the great opportunities that we do thanks to decade of inspired and dedicated efforts: first by Roger A. Coate and Craig Murphy; and then by W. Andy Knight, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Thomas G. Weiss. The outgoing trio and their assiduous managing editor, Tanya Casperson, have also gone to every length to facilitate smooth transition to our editorship. It is an honor--and no small challenge--to follow such class acts. Given the firm foundations that we inherit and the continuing relevance of the original objectives of the journal, we plan to carry on with much past practice. Global Governance has well-earned international reputation for publishing high-quality conceptual and empirical work. The journal is deservedly respected and trusted for its professionalism, pluralism, and policy relevance. With these high credentials, Global Governance is an outlet of choice for academic researchers from multiple disciplines and diverse world regions, as well as for strategic thinkers working with and within policy circles. We intend to build on and enhance this eminent standing. Purposes To what end do we undertake this task? The five incoming editors herald from two leading institutes for research on governance: the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) at the University of Warwick in Britain; and the Centre for Global Studies (CFGS) at the University of Victoria in Canada. Both CFGS and CSGR were set up in the late 1990s as sites for international-quality, leading-edge, multidisciplinary and policy-relevant research on the governance of more world. Centers like ours are understandably proliferating across the planet, given that academic thought and political and administrative practice are running far behind pressing demands to devise effective means of addressing urgent problems. Global Governance has important contributions to make in constructing conceptual and institutional frameworks that deliver greater cultural creativity, ecological integrity, economic efficiency, political stability, social justice, and overall democracy. If successful, our editorship will generate publications and stimulate debates that people ten to fifteen years hence will identify as having been influential catalysts to key developments in public policy. This is not to say that we favor global-scale governance per se and seek as matter of doctrinal conviction to promote its expansion. Accelerated intense globalization of recent decades does demand innovative and practicable regulatory responses to ensure that communications, environmental changes, finance, military capabilities, and the like produce maximal benefits and minimal costs. At least some of the management of affairs must involve substantial elements of transworld coordination. However, the form and extent of global-level rules and institutions in contemporary governance are matters for serious debate. Conceptions Indeed, what is global governance? To some extent we take distance from the journal's subtitle as a review of multilateralism and international organizations, inasmuch as this description could delimit governance too narrowly as matter of formal intergovernmental apparatuses with transworld membership and/or mandate. …