Does The System Work? Global Stresses and the Resilience of Global Governance

Global governance has recently been confronted with a wide variety of new cooperation problems in and across diverse issue-areas, including climate change, global health, financial regulation, and artificial intelligence. Many of these problems, such as Covid-19, have led to crisis situations. In addition, political transformations, such as a changing global power distribution, have weakened the foundations of traditional governance arrangements. New problems have induced a proliferation of alternative institutional forms – such as IIGOs, TGNs, TPPPs, and PTROs – alongside state-based treaties and FIGOs, the major incumbent institutions in global governance. Importantly, these diverse institutions do not operate separately from one another, but are interconnected in various ways. Thus, the proliferation of alternative institutional forms has given rise to the emergence of ‘Hybrid Institutional Complexes’ (HICs), which incorporate all those governance institutions that seek to address specific (if multifaceted) cooperation problems. This paper asks in how far this HICs-based global governance system is fit for purpose. More precisely, it asks how well its institutional variety enables global governance to cope with the stressors it faces today. To analyze this important question, we apply the concept of ‘resilience,’ which encapsulates the notion of persistence in unfavourable circumstances. Resilience includes readiness and preparedness for stresses and threats on one hand, and responsiveness and adaptation to stresses and threats on the other. To be resilient to the stresses it faces, then, contemporary global governance systems must strike an appropriate balance between rigidity and flexibility. We argue that a HICs-based system is better suited to achieve that balance than a centralized governance system. The paper is structured as follows: First, we identify the most important stressors of contemporary global governance: new and multifaceted cooperation problems that cross established issue areas; frequent crises, characterized by a combination of seriousness and immediacy; and political transformations (such as the rise of authoritarian populism and a changing power distribution) that undercut the effectiveness of institutions organized around pre-transition conditions. Second, we identify the specific demands such stressors create for global governance: a demand for more flexible institutional forms that can innovate in terms of governance arrangements, allowing rapid and effective responses to problems and crises; and a demand for change in legacy institutions to reflect changing political realities. Third, we introduce the concept of resilience to discuss how governance institutions can respond to these demands. We compare the resilience of two types of global governance systems: a (centralized) FIGO-based system and a (decentralized) HICs-based system. We advance a two-pronged claim: first, in a static sense, decentralized systems are more resilient than centralised systems at any point in time; and second, in a dynamic sense, centralized systems become more rigid, and thus more vulnerable, over time. The latter argument suggests that it is essential for governance systems to maintain conditions that allow for new institutional entrants, able to renew the existing system in light of current stresses.