Conclusion: The global Governance Prospect

Abstract

As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is instructive to re-examine the territory sketched out by James Rosenau in his seminal article (reprinted in this volume as Chapter 1). At the time of its first publication in 1995, few would have contested that the myriad dynamics that made possible the benefits of globalization were also sources of disorder and boundary-traversing dynamics that offered profound challenges to world order as much as to international relations. But was nascent global politics also producing or facilitating commensurate forms of global governance? The uncertainties, paradoxes and ambiguities highlighted as inescapable features of intellectual engagement with global governance are with us still, but so too are Rosenau’s insights into the actors and dynamics that continue to shape world order and to inform investigations into global governance in all its forms. These include the relocation of authority not only ‘outward’ from states toward forms of transnational control mechanisms, including state/non-state configurations, but also ‘downward’ to sub-national groupings and even to individuals¹ (sometimes in forms that are not necessarily either inclusive or beneficent). The actors and issues quickly change, but the themes persist, not least because globalization has quickened, spread and intensified. For this reason, the very considerable global governance literature that has now been produced in the years since ‘Governance in the Twenty-first Century’ has not diminished the degree to which trying to discern, create, adjust or sustain global governance is an intellectual adventure.