Abstract
For the largest part of human history the environmental and material circumstances of human groups everywhere were subject only to incremental change, much of it generated and mediated locally.1 ‘[I]t took 99.4 per cent of economic history to reach the wealth levels of [the hunter-gatherer], 0.59 per cent to double that level by 1750 and then just 0.01 per cent for global wealth to leap to the levels of the modern world…[in other words], over 97 per cent of humanity’s wealth was created in the last 0.01 per cent of our history.’2 With that wealth has come the dislocations, uncertainties, impacted problems and the governance challenges of our globalised world. Certainly in a world less comprehensively globalised, less populous and less industrially advanced, global governance would not be necessary. In fact, it would scarcely be possible.
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Notes
There is evidence to suggest that as long as 5,000 years ago, human activity was already having an impact on the earth’s climate, and that this might even have forestalled a new ice age. Nevertheless, the period from the industrial revolution represents a dramatic shift in human circumstances — and the speed and unthinking ease with which we are able to bring them about. See William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues and Petroleum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
E. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics (London: Random House, 2005), p.11.
AFP, ‘Hurricanes destroyed 109 oil platforms: US government’, 4 October 2005;
Jitendra Joshi (AFP), ‘Bush calls for new refineries after hurricane havoc’, 4 October 2005. Both available at: http://www.terradaily.com/news/energy-tech-05zzzzzzp.html
Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Battle for the World Food System (London: Portobello Books, 2008).
Geoffrey Vickers, Human Systems Are Different (London: Harper & Row, 1983), p.17 (italics original).
R. Alan Hedley, ‘Convergence in natural, social and technical systems: a critique’, Current Science, Vol. 79, No. 5 (10 September 2000), p.592.
William H. McNeil, The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.74.
See Stephen Boyden, Western Civilization in Biological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism and the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976).
Jim Whitman, The Limits of Global Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).
Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), p.230.
David Byrne, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998).
Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p.34.
See also John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
For the temporal dimension, see Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (London: Routledge, 1998).
This is recounted in Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Millennium: How Computer-Driven Cartography is Revolutionizing the Face of Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp.127–38.
The University of Ottawa Object-Oriented Engineering Site, available at: http://www.site.uottawa.ca:4321/oose/index.html#tightcoupling; see also Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 91.
Joseph A. Tainter, ‘Problem Solving: Complexity, History, Sustainability’, Population and Environment, Vol. 22, No. 1 (September 2000), p.8.
See Geoffrey Vickers, Value Systems and Social Processes (London: Tavistock, 1968), pp.75–6.
James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Lee B. Reichman (with Janice Hopkins Tanne), Timebomb: The Global Epidemic of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003);
Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), Chapter 13.
Stella R. Quah (ed.), Crisis Preparedness: Asia and the Global Governance of Epidemics (The Brookings Institution for the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, 2007).
Chris Brummitt, ‘UN climate chief says US-EU deadlock over emissions cuts threatens climate summit’, 13 December 2007, available at: http://climate. weather.com/articles/emissions121307.html
Helen Yanacopulos, ‘Patterns of Governance: the Rise of Transnational Coalitions of NGOs’, Global Society, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2005), pp.247–66;
Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds), Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
James N. Rosenau, ‘Governance in the Twenty-first Century’, Global Governance, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 1995), p.14.
For a fascinating study of the practical politics of improving standards of regulation in global business, see John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially chapter 26, in which they discuss ‘Five strategies for intervening in global webs of regulation to ratchet-up standards in the world system’, from p.612.
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© 2009 Jim Whitman
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Whitman, J. (2009). Global governance must be highly adaptive in respect of changing human circumstances. In: The Fundamentals of Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234338_8
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