Practices Of Global Governance Research Articles

DIGITAL BORDERS: RUSSIA’S APPROACH TO RUNET REGULATION

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia’s nuanced approach to internet governance, focusing particularly on its management of the Runet (Russian Internet). Through an in-depth exploration, the article examines the intricate strategies and tools employed by the Russian government to regulate online content and control the dissemination of information. Central to this analysis are the surveillance mechanisms of SORM (System for Operative Investigative Activities) and DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technology, which the article meticulously scrutinizes to elucidate their role in enabling state censorship and surveillance. Moreover, the article delves into the multifaceted implications of Russia’s internet governance tactics. It explores how these strategies impact civil liberties, political dissent, and the overall landscape of online expression within Russia. Additionally, the article investigates the effects on technological innovation, considering how stringent internet regulations may stifle the growth of Russian internet giants and impede the development of innovative digital solutions. By navigating the complexities of Russia’s digital governance landscape, this article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the broader implications for global internet governance norms and practices. Through its detailed examination and analysis, the article sheds light on the evolving dynamics of internet regulation and the challenges posed by authoritarian control in the digital age.

Exploring Communities of Practice from an Informality Perspective: Insights from the AU, ECOWAS, and UN in West African Mediation Theaters

Abstract The article explores how and why communities of practice (CoPs) of international organizations (IOs) work together effectively despite the rigid formal bureaucratic and institutional borders they inhabit. The manuscript explains how four informal mechanisms combined to enable CoPs embedded in the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the United Nations (UN) Organization to resolve political crises in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Togo between 2016 and 2022. The informal mechanisms allowed CoPs to overcome their institutional limitations, cross rigid organizational borders, and work together to resolve different political crises in the six countries. Some of the informal mechanisms were cultivated by CoPs, while others emerged organically from activities and interactions of these like-minded professionals. The informal instruments that were developed and used to resolve the crises provide a telling illustration of how CoPs create global governance norms, practices, processes, rules, and structures from below. The enabling role that informality played in the six conflict theaters suggests that paying close attention to the informal dimensions of CoPs has enormous analytical benefits.

Understanding the African Group of Negotiators in the multilateral negotiations on climate change

ABSTRACT This article examines the performance of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) in global climate change negotiations. It provides theoretical insights on the priorities of the AGN, outlines how the African region self-organises in situations of regime complexity and critically analyses the inherent characteristics that create unique constraints to meaningful participation of the AGN in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The study finds that the political mandate of the AGN together with the consistent technical support from climate-focused continental institutions have strengthened the AGN in these negotiations, where the group has had a consistent set of priorities. The article also highlights areas that could enhance the performance of the AGN, including a critical examination of the effect of multiple coalition membership. The conclusion is that as subordinate actors the AGN is effectively contesting the rules and practices of contemporary global climate governance.

Critical Perspectives on the New Situation of Global Ocean Governance

Global ocean governance is the concretization of global governance. Various interest groups interact with and coordinate ocean issues. Global ocean governance is inevitably linked to the new global governance landscape. In recent years, a series of new scenarios in global governance have emerged. These situations have further shaped the plurality of participants and the diversity of mechanisms in global ocean governance. Science and technology innovation and application are prerequisites and prime movers for the evolution of global ocean governance. Major worldwide crises, represented by global climate change and the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, have added great uncertainty to the future development of global ocean governance. The divergence of interests and positions between emerging countries and developed countries, as well as the reshaping of the global geopolitical landscape in recent years, has led to the stagnation or deadlock of a series of international negotiations and international cooperation platforms related to global ocean governance. With the deepening of global governance, non-state actors are not only objects of ocean governance but also bearers of legal obligations and enjoy varying degrees of legal rights, participating in agenda setting, rule construction, and monitoring implementation at different levels of ocean governance. From a critical jurisprudence perspective, in the practice of global ocean governance, the relationship between non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations is more likely to be one of reconciliation than the “state–civil society” dichotomy of moral imagination. This new set of circumstances exposes the divisive and fragmented nature of global ocean governance. This study concludes that the new situation of global ocean governance constitutes a historic opportunity for countries to reexamine the role of the rule of law during the Anthropocene to bridge the fragmentation and gaps in mechanisms and achieve a truly integrated, holistic, and closely nested global ocean governance. The question of how to implement the rule of law requires the introduction of theoretical perspectives such as the Anthropocene, complex systems theory, and the community of a shared future for humanity to undertake a fundamental critical reflection and rethinking of global ocean governance.

Rebels, vigilantes and mavericks: heterodox actors in global health governance

COVID-19 has exposed profound governance challenges that demand more diverse and creative approaches to global health governance moving forward. This article works towards such a pluralization of the field by foregrounding the vital role played by heterodox actors during the pandemic. Heterodox global health actors are backgrounded actors who improve health in different parts of the world, but who remain politically marginalized – and epistemically invisibilized – because they depart in crucial respects from the liberal orthodoxy pervading the field of global health governance. The article analytically foregrounds those heterodox actors through an architectural inversion – a relational approach to the study of global health governance that builds upon recent methodological insights from postcolonial studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. The article then harnesses that methodological approach to empirically investigate the COVID-19 activities of three different heterodox actors: rebel groups providing public health in the borderlands of Myanmar, a women’s vigilante movement stitching face masks in the Czech Republic, and a maverick scientific platform for the international sharing of viral sequence data. Performing that architectural inversion begins to loosen the dominance of the liberal episteme within the practice and study of global health governance. It further visibilizes how that field is continually co-produced by the background activities of many such heterodox actors. It also lays conceptual foundations for a more heterodox future research agenda on global health governance – and arguably global governance more broadly – in response to the numerous unresolved challenges revealed by COVID-19.

China's New Global Health Governance

AbstractThis article analyses China's global health governance (GHG) practices and GHG legal infrastructure in the wake of COVID-19. It posits that China has pursued a mix of bilateral and multilateral strategies during the pandemic to promote global cooperation and domestic regulation to shape an effective GHG response. It demarcates China's proactive role in norm-setting to respond to the global health crisis. It first considers China's responses to COVID-19 and its interaction model with multilateral institutions including WHO and GAVI. It then examines China's bilateral health strategies, taking its interactions with African countries as an example, before analysing and comparing existing norms and practices on the ‘right to regulate’ under the rules of the World Trade Organisation and treaties that China participates in that call for more regulatory recognition. The article then proceeds to examine China's new initiatives in shaping GHG strategy during COVID-19. Finally, it concludes and calls for a coordinated multilateral approach to handle global health crises.

Кибернетическая концепция глобального управления

The cybernetic model of governance, well-established at the national level, has yet to be applied in transnational and global dimensions for analytical purposes, despite favorable conditions for its implementation. Global governance practices are increasingly resembling classic cybernetic challenges, such as maintaining the planet's average temperature within a 1.5°C increase relative to the pre-industrial era. This task essentially involves the creation of climate control on a planetary scale. Its resolution demands not only an acceleration of the energy transition and changes in social behavior and economic consumption patterns at an individual level but also a consideration of the mechanisms of the planet's climatic and geological evolution. This article traces the genealogy of the cybernetic governance model from its initial description in the works of Norbert Wiener to contemporary studies in political science, identifying key concepts and limitations of this model. Utilizing the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, particularly the concept of "macro-securitization," the article justifies the selection of climate change as a crucial case for the cybernetic model of global governance. The analysis of the practice of implementing global governance in the field of climate change aligns with the main characteristics of the cybernetic model and can be viewed as its practical application. The cybernetic model's primary challenge in a global context lies in its requirement for an overarching, unified approach to complex and diverse global issues. The model's emphasis on measurable indicators poses difficulties in areas where quantifiable metrics are less apparent or where multiple competing interests and values must be balanced. This necessitates a nuanced understanding of the global political and socio-economic landscape and the intricate interplay between various actors and factors influencing global governance. The article suggests that while the cybernetic model offers valuable insights for certain global challenges, particularly in environmental governance, its broader application across diverse global governance domains warrants careful consideration and adaptation to the complex realities of global politics and policy-making.

The Critical Subject and the Subject of Critique in International Law and Technology

The making of legal subjects has long been a crucial terrain for critical theory, also in relation to international law, where both emancipatory promises and expressions of power or discipline are tied to how subjects are recognized and enacted. International law's modes of subject-making have therefore been an important site of aspiration, struggle, and critique. While some have celebrated the rise of the individual on the stage of international law, the liberal ideal of legal and political subjectivity lingering in these celebratory accounts has been confronted by different strands of feminist, post-colonial, and Marxist critique. With proliferating use of digital technologies in practices of (global) governance, the making of legal subjects has taken novel forms. Big data manufacture subjects in ways that spark new legal anxieties and destabilize or problematize established patterns of critical engagement. In data-driven practices that we will describe, subjects are no longer exclusively enacted as abstract autonomous entities or classified along stable criteria (of difference or enmity). Sustained by tools of pattern recognition and technologies for the “unsupervised uncovering of correlations,” nascent forms of global governance by data produce subjects as transient clusters of attributes and data points within transient clusters of attributes and data points—bundles of vectors within vectors, only tentatively and temporarily tied together. In this essay, we map out how this mode of subject-making has become prevalent in different domains of international legal practice. We trace these dynamics to changes in the exercise of state sovereignty and the technoscopic regimes—assemblages for information flow, processing, retention, and surveillance—that states rely on.

The interregnum: Governance in the new world disorder

There is a crisis of global governance at this moment in our history -- a moment being labeled as 'the interregnum -- a moment of transition from one world order to another. The turbulence and disequilibrium of this moment in our history have triggered intense and growing interest in the concept and practice of governance at all levels. This is not a reflexive moment; it is a time for serious reflection and contemplation; a time for reconceptualizing ‘global governance’; an auspicious moment for constructing a new global governance paradigm. To assist in this introspective exercise, it may be important to shift from 'problem-solving' theorizing to a 'critical theory' approach that stands outside prevailing understandings of what global governance has come to mean and discard the oversimplified state-centric vision of world order; replacing it with the more nuanced 'summative' global governance - a concept that is more sophisticated and flexible than previous ones and may provide the needed space and time for us to transform the practice of global governance.

Accounting for diversity in AI for medicine

In healthcare, gender and sex considerations are crucial because they affect individuals' health and disease differences. Yet, most algorithms deployed in the healthcare context do not consider these aspects and do not account for bias detection. Missing these dimensions in algorithms used in medicine is a huge point of concern, as neglecting these aspects will inevitably produce far from optimal results and generate errors that may lead to misdiagnosis and potential discrimination. This paper explores how current algorithmic-based systems may reinforce gender biases and affect marginalized communities in healthcare-related applications. To do so, we bring together notions and reflections from computer science, queer media studies, and legal insights to better understand the magnitude of failing to consider gender and sex difference in the use of algorithms for medical purposes. Our goal is to illustrate the potential impact that algorithmic bias may have on inadvertent discriminatory, safety, and privacy-related concerns for patients in increasingly automated medicine. This is necessary because by rushing the deployment of AI technologies that do not account for diversity, we risk having an even more unsafe and inadequate healthcare delivery. By promoting the account for privacy, safety, diversity, and inclusion in algorithmic developments with health-related outcomes, we ultimately aim to inform the Artificial Intelligence (AI) global governance landscape and practice on the importance of integrating gender and sex considerations in the development of algorithms to avoid exacerbating existing or new prejudices.

The politics of ECB’s economic ideas and its implications for European economic governance: embedding a resilient EMU from the top-down?

By focusing on ECB’s economic policy thinking and its internal politics of ideas, this research aims to provide two contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it seeks to enhance scholarly understanding of ideational change inside international organisations (IOs). To do so, it asks (a) how ECB’s economic policy thinking has evolved since the outbreak of the euro crisis, and (b) what drives change in ECB’s ideas on the best way to deepen Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in its fiscal and economic realms. To answer these questions, fiscal policy, structural reforms and convergence towards resilient economic structures are used as case studies. The article argues that the interplay between changes in ECB’s leadership and internal policy discussions promoted by ideational entrepreneurs played a pivotal role in enabling new ideas to emerge inside the Bank. Secondly, by interrogating ECB’s ideas on the way to complete EMU, this research reflects on the future of the euro. It shares the view that the construction of cognitive authority within IOs is an ongoing political struggle over the ideas underpinning the everyday practice of global governance. By looking at the politics of ideas within the ECB, this article aims to contribute to the international political economy of EMU deepening.

A Comparative Study on the Systems for Global Climate Governance between China and the United States from the Perspective of Leadership Competition

Global climate governance, as a public issue worldwide with mounting concern, faces the dual dilemma of an imperfect governance system and a lack of appropriate leader. Among them, China and the United States, as the main leaders of global climate governance, differ significantly in governance systems, and there is also a clear leadership competition between them in their governance practices. In this context, based on the perspective of leadership competition, this paper examines the specific institutions, characteristics, differences, and prospects of China and the United States in global climate governance practices, and hopefully provides policy proposals for China's future participation in global climate governance.

Looking for Utopia: Experts and Global Governance

The coronavirus pandemic has given an old question new traction: what exactly is the meaning of appeals to expert authority in politics? Though basing political decisions on the best available scientific and technical knowledge may be a plain task on the surface, and calls for ‘listening to science’ regularly maintain this perception, the relationship between expertise and politics is complicated. Given the particular centrality of expertise to global governance practices and institutions, what would an international political theory of expertise look like? Two recent volumes on the subject offer highly original answers to this question. Read alongside each other, Lucile Maertens and Marieke Louis’ Why International Organizations Hate Politics and Jens Steffek’s International Organization as Technocratic Utopia bring to the fore the technocratic legacies and depoliticising tendencies of global governance. In this review essay, I first discuss the historical emergence of technocratically-inspired international organisations as portrayed by Jens Steffek, and then turn to Lucile Maertens’ and Marieke Louis’ practitioner-centred account of how depoliticisation works and is best understood analytically. I then offer a comparative discussion and propose that, with the help of both books, we can picture global governance as driven by a search for utopia.

Networked G20 Governance of COVID-19 and its Transversal Crisis Effect

In this article, the Group of 20’s (G20) networked pluralism and transversal policy practices in the governance of COVID-19 and the pandemic crisis effect are analyzed. The G20 is an important global governance hub, with the strategic capacities and authority to improve cooperation on the pandemic and economic recovery efforts. The forum’s increasingly pluralistic networkedgovernance processes have been crucial for recent shifts in global governance practices and authority. They were augmented by transversal consequences of the pandemic crisis effect, the latter denoting the consequences of new evidence during a crisis leading to a heightened perception of uncertainty and the repoliticization of background knowledge. The analysis combines a “practice-relational” social constructivist analytical approach with discourse-analytic and sociological insights. It integrates empirical evidence from semi-structured interviews, informal discussions, participant observation, and documentary analysis of G20 engagement on transversal policy dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with its interlocutors and governance networks. This indicates the growing significance of networked G20 governance, involving engagement with increasingly pluralistic networks of actors from the Global North and Global South.

A Dream Deferred

AbstractInternational news, and the technological infrastructures required to collect, distribute, and publish it, have long been battlegrounds of imperial ambition and anticolonial contestation. In the early 1960s, press professionals, engineers, and telecom officials from the global South elaborated a wide-ranging structural critique of the status quo, arguing that developing mass media required decolonizing international networks and global governance practices that perpetuated media inequality. But over the course of the decade, UNESCO began to invite research and expertise from American social scientists and engineers, who came to define UNESCO’s approach to satellite-based media development. By redefining the scope of media development to an instrumentalist vision of Westernization, such research eclipsed a broad, structural vision of reform, casting southern experts’ more radical designs into shadow. By recovering this history, the article tells a new story of the ideologies and governance practices that helped sustain global news inequality in the satellite age.

After global governance

Technology is of crucial importance for understanding the recent crisis of global governance and concomitant practices of re-territorializing sovereignty. It is far more than an instrument for putting ideas and interests into practice; it is embedded in relationships of power, gives expression to normative decisions and shapes the conditions under which politics is conducted. Technology empowers some actors and disempowers others. It makes new forms of political action possible and others more costly. This crucial role of technology has been emphasized in many dispersed parts of the IR discourse since long. What has often been overlooked, however, is that technological innovation can have a disruptive effect on international institutions. This paper traces this disruptive effect in the administration of the internet by underlining the close nexus between technology, sovereignty and global governance. It finally discusses promising avenues for future research.

The Boundary of Supranational Rules: Revisiting Policy Space Conflicts in Global Trade Politics

While global value chains (GVCs) necessitate effective global economic governance in providing a stable, rule-oriented international economic order for the cross-border flow of factors, it is witnessed that there’s an inevitable decline of multilateralism in the WTO in the contemporary era of deep globalization. This empirical puzzle has stimulated various theoretical explorations, including research on the multilateral trade negotiation model, North–South structural conflicts, and the absence of great power responsibility. The increasing friction between great powers around trade policy has illustrated that policy space conflicts constitute the central challenge of global trade governance. Policy space as a concept illustrates the scope and conditionality of domestic policy instruments when framed by supranational rules. By revisiting existing research, this article clarifies the nature of policy space and categorizes its conflict modes as regulatory diffusion, regulatory differentiation, regulatory competition, and regulatory conflict. The practice of global economic governance shows that deep globalization requires the convergence of diverse domestic regulations that reduce policy space; while maintaining competitive advantage of sovereign states in the global production system requires the preservation of certain flexibilities, especially in areas like interventionism, sequential reforms, or capacity building. This inherent tension causes policy space conflicts to evolve in kind with the escalation of competition among great powers in the global division of labour. Since 2017, the WTO reform agenda, US–EU–Japan trilateral coordination, and intense Trumpian trade wars have all proved that regulatory conflict has offered the dominant model. This shift has led to the decline of multilateralism and the weakening of the multilateral trading system. policy space, multilateralism, global value chains, regulatory competition, global trade politics, convergence and de-convergence, WTO reform

Becoming glocal bureaucrats: mayors, institutions and civil society in smaller cities in Brandenburg during the ‘migration crisis’, 2015–17

ABSTRACT This article analyses the positioning of mayors as intermediaries between global governance and local practices in small towns with no previous experience with immigration in the state of Brandenburg in eastern Germany between 2015 and 2017. To gain an empirical insight into the dynamics in these municipalities, the results of a study of eight towns are presented. The analytical focus is on how the redefinition of the mayors’ position took place and what the expectations, experiences and irritations were that accompanied the arrival of refugees. The article highlights how mayors governed civil society involvement and dealt with the (partly xenophobic) resident population. The mayors turned out to be glocal bureaucrats who mediated on an ad hoc basis and with unclear competences between global flows of people, local needs and nationally organized bureaucracies. Their integration in multilevel governance constellations was characterized by ambiguities. At the same time, the new situation of becoming (finally) a place of in-migration provoked minor cracks in a since long petrified institutional setting and in most places led to civil society engagement Social media acted as ‘fire accelerators’ by picking up a subliminal sense of discontent among the citizens and attributing this feeling to the arrival of the refugees.

Proclaiming a prophecy empty of substance? A pragmatist reconsideration of global governance

In 1995, the UN Commission on Global Governance published their “Our Global Neighbourhood” report and the academic journal “Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations” was launched. Both events in retrospect play a significant role in the emergence of global governance thinking and practice in world politics. Despite inherent ambiguities, this idea since then gained massive traction and became both a modality and a heuristic of world politics. Advancing a pragmatist framework, we unpack global governance in terms of the beliefs which underline and guide it. These beliefs are important since they, as rules for action, define the scope of global governance as a theoretical and a political concept. Reconstructing these beliefs directly from the 1995 report, the article highlights the inherent conflations of normative and analytical commitments indicative of global governance. As a projection surface of all kinds, we believe such a reconsideration of global governance is important to (a) reveal the baselines of its thinking and practice, (b) indicate how its normative and analytical ambitions overlap and conflate, and (c) contribute to a more reflective discussion on the idea which explicitly considers its inherent normativity. At the same time, we hope to show the value of a pragmatist framework on beliefs for the study of world politics.

Global adaptation governance: how intergovernmental organizations mainstream climate change adaptation

ABSTRACT Climate change adaptation is increasingly being mainstreamed into all types of organizations across the world. A large number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the European Union, the World Bank, or Food and Agriculture Organization, have already started to mainstream adaptation. Yet, despite a surge in scholarly interest in climate policy integration over the past decade, adaptation is still predominantly studied as a local issue and mainstreaming in IGOs remains poorly understood. In this article, we develop and test an innovative framework for examining adaptation mainstreaming practices in IGOs. Using quantitative and qualitative data derived from extensive fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020, we examine mainstreaming practices in a large number of IGOs and arrive at two key findings. First, adaptation has been mainstreamed within the procedures and outputs of IGOs across ten (nonclimate) issue areas, while there is also evidence of important issue-specific variation. Second, there is variation across mainstreaming practices in the sense that discursive mainstreaming is most common, whereas more concrete collaboration, policy change affecting projects and programs, and budget allocations are less common. We conclude with a discussion of how our framework can inform the theory and practice of global adaptation governance. Key Policy Insights IGOs have mainstreamed adaptation into a large array of issue areas, yet scholarly and practical debates remain siloed. Mainstreaming adaptation has advanced most in IGOs in the areas of food and development and least in the domain of migration and security. Discursive mainstreaming is more common than other types of adaptation mainstreaming in IGOs, regardless of the issue area. Global governance is a distinct setting in which powerful states, institutional complexity, and funding constraints strongly affect IGO practices to successfully mainstream adaptation.