Looking Forward: Incremental Change or Transformation?

Abstract

IN OUR INAUGURAL ESSAY, TIM SISK AND I DECLARED OUR INTENTION TO FOSter exploration of the ways in which social goods--like wealth, power, security, authority, food, water, and knowledge--are continuously distributed or maldistributed through cooperation and competition among influential actors--public, nonprofit, and private (including illicit associations)--within a constantly evolving normative framework, an increasingly stressed natural environment, and stunning technological change. Coincidentally, we hoped to illuminate the reasons why the extant system of governance so inadequately addresses the great threats to human flourishing from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to climate change, slaughter of the helpless, and destitution. The question we asked ourselves was: What format would best serve our ends? Editors, like other human beings, are to a degree path dependent. We accepted our structural legacy, but tweaked it in part by increasing the number of special issues and sections and beginning the normalization of longer review essays. Perhaps we departed modestly from some of our predecessors by convening scholars and practitioners around issues and events that we deemed particularly salient in terms of our larger aims. An early example was the symposium that I organized on the controversial Goldstone Report. I had two immediate goals. One was to promote clarification through discourse of the constraints that human rights and humanitarian law impose on the parties to asymmetric conflicts whether occurring within a single territorial authority or across international boundaries. Another was to strengthen the precedent for relatively rapid scholarly assessment of important UN reports and thereby to sharpen fact-finding and analytical standards for UN inquiries. After all, an important element of effective global governance is a systemic capacity for fact-finding and assessment that will be widely perceived as authoritative. A second product of our efforts to organize collective inquiry was the special issue on the multilateral diplomacy of states moving rapidly higher in the league tables of geo-economic and geostrategic influence, specifically Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries) which we followed up with a similar piece on Turkey. Had time allowed, we would have commissioned additional pieces at a minimum on Indonesia and Nigeria or South Africa. Yet a third illustration of our attempt to convene scholars in order to address a critical governance issue are the two articles on the governance of transnational river systems that appeared in the previous issue. One of my disappointments as coeditor was my inability to find a scholar willing and able to lead an assessment of measures taken by nations with relatively effective governments to mitigate the impact of global market forces on sectors of the national population most vulnerable to rapid changes in comparative advantage. I saw it as an effort to identify best practices in helping not only the destitute, but also members of the middle and working classes who in middle age find themselves economically redundant. Probably for youth unemployment we would have needed a separate, albeit related, study of best practices. These days even relatively successful states have diminished fiscal resources for protecting the welfare of their citizens. …