Developing a framework for knowledge in global governance

To what extent can we say that knowledge plays a direct role in global governance? This paper looks at how knowledge impacts on global governance efforts. Foreign affairs is too often treated as something that develops under conditions of anarchy; we focus rather on global governance as something that is polity building, and thus responsive to public policy theories, which can be adapted to explain policymaking in a global context. Bringing together polity-building and the faces of power literature in international relations with theories of the policy process, particularly multiple streams theory and the actor coalition framework, we create a new typology for understanding knowledge as a specific type of ideational power capacity that functions in, through, and over global policy initiatives. The paper concludes with a brief empirical test of the framework.