Has Global Governance Come to an End?

Since the mid-1990s, a broad literature on ‘global governance’ has emerged. In this literature, global governance commonly refers to ‘systems of rule at all levels of human activity – from the family to the international organization – in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions’ (James Rosenau). Following this as well as other definitions with a compatible focus, the goal of global governance research is to describe, map, analyse and assess transformations in the 'literally millions' of overlapping spheres of authority that extend across borders: How and by whom is global governance conducted? Which forms does it take? Why and how have these forms changed over time? And what consequences do the manifold structures and processes of global governance and for whom? In recent years, however, public and academic debates have witnessed a turn towards ‘geopolitics’. The comeback of this older concept suggests two developments. First, it suggests that world politics has returned to a more state-centric mode of interaction. Second, it expresses an idea according to which power considerations (as well as power shifts) have become a more central driving force in world politics again. Against this background, our paper asks whether global governance has come to an end. In responding to this question, we first distinguish conceptually, between ‘global governance, the thing’ and ‘global governance, the lens'. While the former would end if a power-dominated and transactional system of geopolitics replaces the predominantly rules-based systems global governance, the latter would end only if scholars stopped studying world politics through a global governance perspective. Methodologically, we use the hypothetical creation of a ‘Global Governance Observatory’ as a starting point for our reflections on the question whether global governance may be coming to an end in either of the two senses. In so doing, we seek to understand what is left of global governance, how the existing structures and processes of global governance in different issue areas of world politics respond to contemporary world political dynamics – and how we could know either and track changes not only in the forms, but also in the extent of ‘global governance, the thing ‘ and ‘global governance, the lens‘. Our contribution builds on our article ‘Global governance as a perspective on world politics’, published in 2006 and used widely in global governance syllabi around the world ever since. The Joint Sessions would provide an excellent forum to discuss our ideas as well as the potential of / for a Global Governance Observatory with top scholars in the field of global governance.