Globalisation, Governance and Participation

Abstract

During the last two decades the word ‘globalisation’ has come to dominate discourses on the world’s political economy. While its economic dimensions often come to the fore in such debates, with Ireland characterised as one of the world’s fastest growing economies (Rios-Morales and Brennan, 2008) and African states contrarily the least (Castells, 2000), the concept embraces a wide range of interlinked economic, political, social, ideological and cultural facets (Munck, 2007). Of particular interest here are its implications for national political arrangements. Held et al. (1999: 16) define globalisation as ‘a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations and transactions … generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power’. The works of McGrew (1997), Held et al. (1999), Castells (2000, 2004), Carnoy and Castells (2001) and Held and McGrew (2003) argue that contemporary globalisation invites a significant rethinking of democratic theory, most especially in respect of traditional accounts of liberal democracy and the role and influence of the state therein. Held and McGrew’s assertion that ‘The state has become a fragmented policy-making arena, permeated by transnational networks (governmental and non-governmental) as well as by domestic agencies and forces’ (2003: 11) draws attention to the extension of contemporary nation state’s field of action, in the form of complex webs of networks and political forces, which states mediate in their efforts to formulate policy and direct individual nations’ development.