Global Governance
Governance is a process or all processes of governing. It is mainly undertaken by a market, hierarchy (government) and network. It is undertaken over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory. It needs laws, norms, power or language.
Governance relates to “the processes of interaction and decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions. Although government may be involved in governance, it is possible to have ‘governance without government’.
Global governance is a broad, dynamic and complex process of interactive decision-making at the global level.
Global governance refers to the processes through which international affairs are coordinated.
Global Governance or world governance is a movement towards political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region. It tends to involve institutionalization. These institutions of global governance_the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the World Bank, etc,._tend to have limited or demarcated power to enforce compliance. The modern question of world governance exists in the context of globalization and globalizing regimes of power: politically, economically and culturally. In response to the acceleration of interdependence on a worldwide scale, both between human societies and between humankind and the biosphere, the term "global governance" may also be used to name the process of designating laws, rules, or regulations intended for a global scale.
Global governance is not a singular system. There is no " world government" but the many different regimes of global governance do have commonalities: "While the contemporary system of global political relations is nit integrated, the relation between the various between the various regimes of global governance is not integrated, the relation between the various regimes of global governance is not insignificant, and the system does have a common dominant organizational form. The dominant mode of organization today is bureaucratic rational-regularized, codified and rational. It is common to all modern regimes of political power and frames the transition from classical sovereignty to what David Held describes as the second regime of sovereignty –liberal international sovereignty.
Global governance involves formal and informal mechanisms, governmental and non-governmental bodies and intergovernmental and, sometimes, supranational bodies.
Intergovernmentalism refers to interaction among states which takes place on the basis of sovereign independence. Sovereign independence is a process of unanimous decision-making.Eg.,commin form of Treaties or alliances, main form of leagues or confederations like OPEC,OECD.
Supranationalism is the existence of an authority that is higher than that of the nationstate and capable of imposing its will on it (transfer of sovereignty and decision-making authority from constituent states to an international or regional organization).Eg., The European Union.
States and governments remain the primary institution for articulating public interests and those of the global community as a whole.
Global policy is made by a system of horizontal and vertical ‘interactions’ in which officials in different branches of government work with counterparts in other countries as well as with activists, scientists, bankers and others outside government. Global governance is institutions through which these interactions take place. Global governance is not the same international organizations,international anarchy, global hegemony and world government.
Global governance is the management of global policies in the absence of a central government.
The key features of global governance are:
1.Polycentrism− Despite the UN’s overarching role within the modern global governance system, global governance is multiple rather than singular, having different institutional frameworks and decision-making mechanisms in different issue areas.
2. Intergovernmentalism− states and national governments retain considerableinfluence within the global governance system
3. Mixed actor involvement − in addition to states and international organizations, global governance embraces NGOs, TNCs and other institutions of global civil society (the blurring of the public/private divide meaning that the distinction between the state and civil society in domestic politics is absent in global decision-making)
4. Multilevel processes − global governance operates through interaction between groups and institutions at various levels (municipal, provincial, national, regional and global) with no single level enjoying predominance over the others.
5. Deformalization− global governance tends to operate through norm-based and informal international regimes rather than through formal and legally constituted bodies.
Global governance is more an emerging process than an established system.
Global governance is not world government, and even less democratic globalization. In fact, global governance would not be necessary, were there a world government. Domestic governments have monopolies on the use of force—the power of enforcement. Global governance refers to the political interaction that is required to solve problems that affect more than one state or region when there is no power to enforce compliance. Problems arise, and networks of actors are constructed to deal with them in the absence of an international analogue to a domestic government. This system has been termed disaggregated sovereignty.
Global governance is successful at the US in the Economic System. Example: The Bretton Woods System –stems from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which sought to establish the architecture for the post war International economic order by creating three bodies:IMF,WB,WTO. The Bretton Woods agreement is a clear example of the multilateralism. However, this would be to ignore the crucial role played by the USA.
The USA needed to ensure that domestic growth levels could be sustained in the postwar period. This required the construction of an open and stable international economic system.
US thinking was shaped by a growing awareness of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the need to contain the spread of communism. This encouraged the USA to seek ways of promoting reconstruction and recovery in war-ravaged Europe, as well as, over time, in defeated Germany and Japan.
On 15 August 1971, US President Richard Nixon launched a New Economic Policy, sometimes called the ‘Nixon shock’. Among other things, this suspended the convertibility of the dollar to gold at the established rate. This last measure effectively sounded the death knell of the Bretton Woods system, paving the way for major currencies to float instead of staying fixed.
Nixon’s decision was made in the context of emerging difficulties in the US economy. Increased government spending due to the Vietnam War and President Johnson’s Great Society programme of public education and urban redevelopment had led torampant inflation, which, in turn, worsened the USA’s balance-of-trade position. Moreover, the USA was facing stiffer competition from export-oriented economies such as Japan and Germany as well as newly industrializing states such as Korea and Taiwan.
The relative decline of the US economy was almost 50% of world industrial output in 1945 and about 20% by the early 1970s.
Ultimately, the decision to end the Bretton Woods system was determined by the USA’s declining gold stocks and thus its inability to maintain the value of $. By 1970, US gold stocks were worth $10 billion compared with $25 billion in 1945.
Therefore, the Bretton Woods System is success in Economic System but global governance structures and rules are characterized by severe asymmetries. There are marked asymmetries of access to the various decision-making processes, with developing countries having to abide by and/or shoulder the effects of rules and regulations over which they have limited influence.