THE UNITED NATIONS MEETS THE 21ST

CENTURY: CONFRONTING THE

CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL
GOVERNANCE
• The sum of laws, norms, policies and institutions that define, constitute
and mediate trans-border relations between states, cultures, citizens,
intergovernmental and non- governmental organizations and the market-
the wilders and the objects of the exercise of international public power.
Just as importantly, they must be capable of addressing contemporary
challenges effectively.
 PARADOX OF THE UN

• The UN is both a global governance actor and site (Thakur, 2011).

• No state can be confident of being protected against the predatory
instincts of a powerful neighbor or global giant, and no group of people
can feel free from fear and want because the United Nations exists and
because what it does.
• The United Nations has moved for the simple and traditional operations of classical,
consent-based missions to the more challenging, peace operations in situations of
complex humanitarian emergencies. The chief multilateral organizations do not meet
current standards of representivity, consent, juridical accountability, rule of law,
broad participation and transparency. The more this happens, the more people will
realize that multilateralism is value-laden, connoting fundamental social and political
choices regarding the balance between the market and the equity human rights
governance and democracy.
• The vitality and survival of international organizations depend on two factors: the
capacity to change and adapt and the quality of their governance. While the
world organization has adapted and changed to such an extent that its founder
might have problems recognizing it, it is ill-adapted to the formidable, challenges
of the current century. In a time of transformative change- from the rise of new
economic powers to the growing tide against repressive regimes to the chorus of
voices in favor of gender equality. Whatever contemporary issue is of greatest
concern- be it climate change, mass atrocities pandemics, terrorism, or weapons
of mass destruction (WMDs)- multidisciplinary perspectives, efforts across
sectors with firm central direction and inspired leadership are required.
 GLOBAL GOVERNANCE, THE IDEA

• One way to think of ‘governance’ is as purposeful systems of rules or norms that

ensure order beyond what occurs ‘naturally’. In the domestic context, governance is
usually more than government, implying shared social purpose and goal orientation
as well as formal authority or police powers. Global governance is a rules-based
order without government. The UN represents a structure of authority that rests on
institutionalized state practices and generally accepted norms (Hurd, 1999, 2007).
• ‘The starting point is that governance for the planet is weak.’
• Consequently, however useful as a heuristic device to explain complex multilateral
and transnational interactions, the basic challenge is whether global governance
without a world government can actually address adequately the range of problems
faced by humanity.
• In 1992, James Rosenau and Ernst Cziempiel published their theoretical collection of
essays Governance without Government (Rosenau and Cziempiel, 1992) In 1995 the
policy-oriented commission on global governance’s report Our Global
Neighborhood was published (Commission on Global Governance, 1995) on along
with first issue of the academic journal Global Governance.
• States and state-centered structures (i.e intergovernmental organizations IGOs and
interspecifically of the UN System) that help ensure international order increasingly
find themselves sharing the governance stage with a host of other actors. In a
diverse, complex and interdependent world, solutions to collective-action problems
are often unattainable by states alone.
• Instead civil society actors play increasingly active roles in shaping norms, laws and
policies. They are participants in global governance as advocates, activists and
policy makers. They provide additional levers to people and governments to
improve the effectiveness and enhance the legitimacy of public policy while also
posing challenges of representation, accountability and legitimacy.
• This is logic behind creating the 'Global Compact' at the UN Millenium Summit of
2000 when the private sector - both the for-profit and the nonprofit species - was
characterized as a necessary partner wwith states in the UN.

•
 AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

• the UN provides and manages the framework for bringing together the world's
leaders to tackle the pressing problems of the day for the survival, development and
welfare of all peoples, everywhere.
• Today's world is governed by an indistinct patchwork of authority that is as diffuse as
it is contingent.
• UN System and IGOs in general that collectively underpin global governance are
inadequately resourced, not vested with the requisite policy authority and resource-
mobilizing capacity and sometimes incoherent in their seperate policies and
philosophies.
 AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

• A messy, untidy and incoherent framework encompasses numerous actors and levels
of analysis; the seperate parts often move at different paces and in different
directions in tryng to regulate, manage and otherwise cope with a turbulent and
rapidly changing world.
• Better and more effective global governance will nt simply materialize: agency is
essential. Craig Murphy (1994:9)
 AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

• Beginning with Dante's Monarchia at the beginning of the fourteenth century, there
is a long tradition of criticizing the existing empires and then state system (at that
time, only the European) and replacing it with universal government (Mazower,
2012).
• Alexander Wendt (2003) suggests that 'a worls state is inevitable'. However
desirable, such an eventuality appears fancital. Why? Because a mixture of utopia
and power are required to avoid stagnation and despair, but ‘international
government is impossible so long as power, which is an essential condition of
government, is organized nationally’ (Carr, 1964. p 108).
 AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

• The immediate aim is to understand the contemporary nature of efforts to help

enhance order in international relations and to improve ‘the framework of rules,
institutions and practices that set limits and give incentives for the behaviour of
individuals, organizations and firms’ (UNDP, 1999:8)
• They specifically target actions that aim to be comprehensive and not merely
piecemeal, that are multisectoral, democratically accountable and inclusive of civil
society in the shared management of a troubled and fragile world order.
 AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

• Global governance reflects that realization that states and states-centric institutions
do not have the capacity to address the challenges that render borders ever more
porous.
• The system of global governance has not met the test that it must channel behaviour
in such a way as to eliminate or substantially ameliorate the problem that led to its
creation (Young, 1994: 30)
 GLOBALIZATION

• The primary dimension of globalization concerns the expansion of economic

activities across state border; the growing volume and variety of cross-border flows
of finance, investments, goods, and services; ideas, information, legal systems,
organizations and people; the rapid and widespread diffusion of technology; and
cultural exchanges.
 CLARIFICATION OF GLOBALIZATION

1. Even in this globalizing era, the movement of people remains restricted and strictly
regulated and, in the aftermath of 9/11, even more so.
2. Economic interdependence is highly asymmetrical the benefits of linking and the costs of
delinking are not equally distributed among partners.
3. Compared to the post-war period, the average annual rate of world growth has steadily
slowed during the age of globalization: from 3.5 per cent per capita in the 1960s, to 2.1, 1.3
and 1.0 per cent in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, respectively (Nayyar, 2002, 2006: 153-4).
4. And long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was a growing divergence, not
convergence, in income levels between countries and people, with widening inequality
among and within nations.
5. Globalization has also unleashed many ‘uncivil society’ forces like international terrorism;
drugs, people and gun trafficking; and illicit money flows (Heine and Thakur, 2011)
 AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

• A ‘world government’ would imply an international system with some the capacities
that we customarily associate with functional national government – notably powers
to control or repel threats, raise revenues, allocate expenditures, redistribute incomes
and require compliance from citizens as well as ensure their rights.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY?

1. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first concert systems of multilateral,
high-level political gathering such as the Congress of Vienna was , which
established ‘diplomacy by conference’ among the European power.
2. At the end of the nineteenth century came the second strand in the form of The
Hague System, whose goal was a universal membership conference system that
would meet regularly to build a peaceful world politics based on law and reasoned
deliberation, as well as to consider specific problems or crises.
 IDENTIFYING AND DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS, THE
UN’S COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
• The main gaps that the UN meets in the 21st century are those that it has confronted
since 1945: knowledge, norms, policy, institutions and compliance.
 FOUR ESSENTIAL ROLES IN IDENTIFYING AND
DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS

1. Managing knowledge
2. Developing norms
3. Promulgating recommendations
4. Institutionalizing ideas
CONCLUSION: THE UN’S IDEATIONAL ROLE, THE 21ST
CENTURY’S CHALLENGE
• Two important features that distinguish global governance from earlier UN
1. Many viewed international cooperation and law as more effective than isolated efforts and the
law of the jungle. But it was still typical for a state to solve most problems on its own, or at least
to insulate itself from effects coming from outside its borders.
2. Earlier thinking emphasized state-centric notions and only grudgingly admitted the presence let
alone capacities of other actors. But starting in the 1980s and earlier in some cases, non-state
actors (both civil society and market-oriented ones) were recognized as growing in importance
and reach. They were more systematically embraced and became an increasingly integral part of
comprehensive solutions either promulgated or actually undertaken by the United Nations and
many of its member states.
CONCLUSION: THE UN’S IDEATIONAL ROLE, THE 21ST
CENTURY’S CHALLENGE
• Moreover, it became increasingly difficult to maintain that the existence of problems
without passports or the increase in non-state actors and their influence were
exceptional.
• The UN’s conceptualization of global governance has not yet managed to move
beyond the fiction of the sovereign equality of states but it has expanded to
encompass both transnational market forces and civil society as a regular bill of fare
instead of an occasional snack.
• The global financial crisis of 2008 was the result of shortcomings, deficiencies and
failures in US domestic financial governance.