Nodal Governance: The Diffusion of Power in Global Forest Governance Networks

Abstract

The growing importance of non-state actors in global and transnational politics is a persistent theme in the global governance literature, providing a key motivation for going beyond the older international regime framework. The latter’s stress on intergovernmental negotiation leading to the creation of hard international law and the existence of durable international organizations has been under attack for some time. For every effort at global coordination that proceeded according to the regime model, it seemed there were many more that achieved significant results in other ways. And, as the climate change ‘regime’ clearly demonstrates, even where the model of negotiation, framework convention and protocol was followed to the letter, it is sometimes hard to discern much progress on the ground. Dissentient voices unhappy at the mainstream policy choices proceeded with their own initiatives, altering the calculus of cost and benefits for the main regime actors and introducing new modes of coordination based on their own rules and procedures. The ‘governance’ idea is intended to capture such developments (Okereke et al., 2009; O’Neill, 2009).