The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance

Abstract

The pursuit of global democratic governance cannot be confined to global institutions; national state institutions and nation-based citizens need to be part of this project. In this lecture, I want to map a variety of mechanisms and dynamics that can be seen as part of an architecture for democratic participation by state institutions and citizens in global governance. Crucial to my analysis is the notion that the global is multi-scalar: it does not take place only at the selfevident global scale, but also at the national and sub-national scales. I identify two partly interrelated domains for exploring this topic. One domain is the ways in which the state actually participates in governing the global economy, notwithstanding expanded deregulation and privatization, and notwithstanding the growing authority of non-state actors. The question becomes one of detecting the specific type of authority/power this participation might entail for the state vis-a-vis global actors and processes. Further, if the state indeed has such authority, or could in principle have it, the question is whether that authority can be a bridge to a politics of the global for citizens—who are, after all, still largely confined to the national domain for the full exercise of their powers. If national state participation in setting up the legal and institutional infrastructure for globalization does indeed contain a set of channels for citizens to demand participation in global politics, including the right to demand accountability from global actors, then the formal and informal capabilities of citizens to do so, as well as their disposition to do so, become crucial. This is the subject of the second domain. The organizing question is: to what extent citizenship, even though highly formalized, might actually be less finished as an