Abstract
No part of the world remains unaffected by human activity: we have created or conditioned the fundamentals of human circumstances around the globe. For both good and ill, the world as it is — ‘everything that is the case’ — is an outcome of our values and the aspirations they inspire. Acknowledging this does not nullify plurality as a fact or as an ideal, nor does it lessen the importance of contention and resistance to dominant forms of social, political and economic organisation1 — in fact, quite the opposite. As discussed in Chapter 1, our globalised condition has left few aspirations innocent — that is, without far-reaching and sometimes undesirable consequences; and at least in the developed world we have become acutely conscious that aspirations in organised, social forms entail costs and outcomes that not even the most scrupulous democratic procedures can obviate. The extent of globalisation means that ‘we the people’ is no longer merely an expression of inclusion within a bounded culture or polity, but is now also the expression of a common human fate. So for example, there is a good deal about large-scale carbon emitting behaviours such as power generation, mass transportation and international tourism and their impact on distant peoples and environments that we could reasonably characterise as ‘collateral damage’.
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Notes
Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000).
Louis W. Pauly, ‘Global finance, political authority, and the problem of legitimation’, in Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker (eds) The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.76–90.
Deutsche Welle, ‘German environment minister warns against exploiting Arctic’, 29 August 2007. Available at: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2756813,00.html;
Cleo Paskal, ‘How climate change is pushing the boundaries of security and foreign policy’, Chatham House Briefing Paper, June 2007. Available at: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/499/
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James N. Rosenau, Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
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Geoffrey Vickers, Value Systems and Social Processes (London: Tavistock Publications, 1968), p.116. Italics original.
For an examination of the conceptual history of the term, see Michael Redclift, ‘Sustainable development (1987–2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age’, Sustainable Development, 13 (2005), pp.212–27.
Charles E. Lindblom, ‘A century of planning’, in Michael Kenny and James Meadowcroft (eds) Planning Sustainability (London: Routledge, 1999), p.59.
Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 1993), p.1.
Jörg Friedrichs, ‘Global Governance as the Hegemonic Project of Transatlantic Civil Society’, in Markus Lederer and Philipp S. Müller (eds), Criticizing Global Governance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp.45–68;
Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001).
Jim Whitman, ‘The Challenge to Deliberative Systems of Technological Systems Convergence’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 4 (December 2007), pp.329–42.
Report of a NEST High-Level Expert Group, Synthetic Biology: Applying Engineering to Biology (Brussels: European Commission, 2005), p.5.
The principal US document on technological convergence is M.C. Roco and W.S. Bainbridge, ‘Executive Summary’, in NSF/DOC-sponsored report, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science (Arlington, Virginia, 2002). Available at: http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBICreport.pdf.
The primary EU report is Alfred Nordmann (Rapporteur), Converging Technologies — Shaping the Future of European Societies (2004). Available at: http://www.ntnu.no/2020/pdf/final_report_en.pdf.
Geoffrey Vickers, Human Systems Are Different (London: Harper & Row, 1983), p.xv.
M.C. Roco, ‘National Nanotechnology Initiative — Past, Present and Future’, 20 February 2006. Available at: http://www.nano.gov/NNI_Past_Present_Future.pdf, p.31.
T.M. Wigley, ‘The Climate Change Commitment’, Science, Vol. 307, No. 5716 (March 2005), pp.1766–9.
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© 2009 Jim Whitman
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Whitman, J. (2009). However extensive the coverage, global governance arrangements will remain aspirational to some degree. In: The Fundamentals of Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234338_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234338_9
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