Global Governance Re ections (Varun)

Part 6: Climate
The central takeaway for me is rst that while the issue of climate change is approaching
a critical juncture at which catastrophic environmental collapse may become unavoidable,
humanity still has a window of opportunity to avert the crisis. As the only true global
public good, environmental damage is prone to the problem of the tragedy of the
commons. While Dalby and other authors encourage greater attention to be paid to
climate challenges by securitizing the issue, framing it as an environmental security crisis
has not led to su cient, concerted mobilization by states to combat climate change.

Fundamentally, the global economic order, I nd, has not found a mechanism to jointly
pursue ecological and economic development goals in balanced proportions. Further, the
climate agenda has only been developed in recent years, long after di erent groups of
countries pursued di ering development pathways with di erent degrees of exploitation
of the environment. Consequently, e orts at developing a universal and uniform process
of global environmental governance have been thwarted by various governments. These
states accuse proponents of denying developing economies the right to develop
adequately, in the process of which the environment might be harmed - but this is seen as
a justi able cost for the alleviation of poverty in poorer countries.

While the issue of hyperbolic discounting is discussed more in the following section on
COVID, I argue that it is equally, if not more, applicable to the issue of climate
governance. Present societies seem more willing to pass on the burden of degradation to
future generations while prioritizing immediate economic growth. It is for this reason that
the Paris Climate Agreement’s introduction of common but di erentiated responsibilities,
while allowing national governments to independently propose their contribution levels to
emission reductions, is an important innovation in climate policy instruments. By returning
to states the power to calibrate their participation in the climate cause as nely as they
see t, it is hoped that they will make more sustained commitments to environmental
protection.

However, a more fundamental shift, of not seeing the environment as a nite resource to
be extracted (like Mercantilism) but instead a resource to be replenished before usage
(similar to ideas of economic growth), is yet to surface. As such, I call for the emulation of
the capitalist growth agenda in the environmental arena for future global governance
e orts.

Part 7: COVID
From the readings (especially Prof’s book), I nd that the COVID crisis and responses to
it, should be understood along 3 key axes: Scienti c knowledge, availability of resources
and infrastructure to mount a response, and political will to do so. By the time COVID
surfaced, the world had already responded to two previous coronavirus outbreaks. What
made COVID di erent was the increased transmission and the signi cant connectivity of
travel routes that facilitated the spread of the virus across the globe.

By this time, human social and economic activity had come to be performed in such a
densely populated network built on in-person interactions, that the need to scale down
economic processes of production and sales posed such a signi cant nancial cost.
Thus, many governments lacked the political will to enforce early lockdowns, preferring to
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take the risk of limited transmission until the burden on the healthcare system became
too signi cant to tolerate.

The di ering responses to the pandemic also revealed the e ects of variations in the
resourcing levels of di erent economies. While many nations, including developing Asian
economies, scrambled to develop domestic vaccines, not all were equally successful.
Further, I feel that it is also important to consider how not all economies were equally
capable of adopting to a new “digital normal”, which threatened to exacerbate existing
global digital divides.

While a scienti c consensus did begin to emerge after some time of vaccine research,
various governments incorporated scientists’ counsel in their policymaking processes to
di ering extents. This suggests that the diversity of responses to COVID, which hindered
the development of a uni ed global response, is not only a question of resources but the
function of political forces. It leads me to conclude that global governance of any issue,
but particularly one such as health crises that contends with active natural forces like a
self-replicating viruses, operates in both the material and ideational realms. An e ective
response at global, national, and sub-national levels can only be carried out when
designed congruently across both these realms.

Part 8: AI & Digital Governance

The major tensions that characterize the debate over governing digital technologies like
the internet and AI stem from the initial promises with which they were developed. When
initially conceived, the digital landscape was touted to allow the equal and unrestricted
spread of information across the globe, thereby democratizing the sphere of information
and potentially enhancing the democratic process.

In practice, however, the digital world has not been the great uni er it was meant to be.
Countries at di ering levels of economic and technological development have di erent
levels of internet access with unequal levels of stability and reliability. Social media has
created echo-chambers online where disinformation can get ampli ed. The newest
cutting-edge technologies such as AI are disproportionately being developed in the two
largest economies - the US and China, with other countries having divided opinions on
how to close the gap. Concerns are also being raised about the potential for abuse, such
as the use of AI face recognition in the Chinese surveillance state, or the prospect of job
destruction by AI-led automation.

As a programmer myself, my response is twofold. First, I acknowledge the inequities

inherent in the current digital landscape. However, this is a hardware resourcing issue that
can be easily resolved by upgrading the infrastructure of poorer economies. The more
complex challenge is AI’s disruption of the job market. Fundamentally, it is important to
remember that AI and humans speak two di erent languages. Machine learning is built on
mathematical models that can emulate and intelligently reproduce phenomena for which
the corresponding mathematical logic has been discovered. However, AI is not able to
interpret or more speci cally, assign meaning to the output.

As such, I believe that while most non-interpretive jobs will come to be automated, a
smaller group of jobs that hinge on subjective meanings, such as medical sociology, will
continue to require human e ort. The global governance challenge here, in my view,
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would be to educate the global population in these interpretive disciplines so that we

continue to participate in the economy when AI becomes more widespread.

Part 9: Overall Views

Centering my analysis on Prof’s proposed paradigm of the human governance paradox
and it sub-paradoxes, I nd that the common thread linking all the debates throughout
the whole course is the need for global governance “to t”. The challenge in including
multiple players in an initiative is in how solutions lose sight of individual actors’ speci c
challenges. Attempting to isolate global ows to exercise better control over them also
seems impossible, as ows of money, nance, goods, people, even natural elements,
mutually interact with one another. While the Paris Agreement seems to hold promise in
circumventing the former issue, I would recommend entertaining a bolder possibility of
embracing fragmentation in global systems, but promoting inter-operability through
means such as binding international corporate law. This would be akin to “sandboxing” in
mobile application development, where one application (or global ow) is insulated from
others by di ering sets of regulations that are agreed on between separate blocs of
countries. However, there should also be a parallel system of legal norms that allow these
separate systems to interact, and to allow countries to transition into di erent blocs in
di erent issue areas as best serves the resolution of that issue.

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