THE KEY INSIGHT EXPRESSED IN THE STRIKING WORDS OF THE BRUNDTLAND Commission--The Earth is one but the world is not (1)--remains as relevant a political statement about most global governance challenges today as it was about sustainable development twenty-seven years ago. Global governance entails multilevel and networked relations and interactions for managing and facilitating linkages across policy levels and domains. It consists of formal and informal arrangements that provide more order and stability for a world in constant and rapid flux than would occur naturally--the range of international cooperation without a world government. Intensifying global interdependence, growing recognition of problems that defy solutions by a single state or organization, and increasing numbers and importance of nonstate actors have all contributed to the growth of global governance as an analytical framework. As the numbers of international actors and the frequency and intensity of their interactions have grown, so has the requirement for institutionalized cooperation among them. International transactions are typically characterized by order, stability, and predictability. This immediately raises a puzzle: how is the world governed even in the absence of a world government in order to produce norms, codes of conduct, and regulatory, surveillance, and compliance instruments? How are values allocated quasi-authoritatively for the world and accepted as such, without a government to rule the world? The answer, we believe, lies in global governance--just like the outbreaks and pockets of disorder, instability, volatility, and conflict represent crises of governance whether domestic or global. The content of global governance embraces the totality of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate relations between citizens, societies, markets, and states in the international system--the wielders and objects of the exercise of international public power. The architecture of global governance is made up of formal international organizations with the UN system as the core of the organized multilateral order, formal regional and subregional organizations, and informal general-purpose groupings. The most visible example of the latter in recent times is the Group of 20 (G-20) heads of state or government, but these groupings also include the old Group of 7 (G7) and the new Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) groupings of the industrialized and emerging market economies, and even informal but functionally specific and single-problem-oriented institutions like the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Nuclear Security Summits as well as transnational networks of civil society and market actors. This journal should be the first port of call for all students, scholars, and practitioners engaged in the study and conduct of global governance. We are only too conscious of following in the footsteps of several distinguished teams of editors who have successfully established Global Governance. They did so in the relatively short period of time since it was launched as the flagship journal of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS) to serve as a premier publication where key and insightful articles can be submitted by researchers and subsequently read by all who are interested in knowing about the latest research and thinking on global governance. This continues to be so whether the goal is to describe, explain, or evaluate the state of global governance and whether the primary interest is in the actors, processes, structures, or outcomes of global governance. It is certainly our intention to maintain Global Governance as the journal of choice for researchers, writers, and readers alike on the full breadth and range of issues, problems, and responses of interest to the academic and policy communities. To this end, the well-established practices of double-blind peer review to ensure rigorous quality control and standards of scholarship will be continued. …