Abstract
Governance has become a hotly contested concept across the social sciences over the past two decades. Within the fields of comparative and international political economy, it has become associated primarily with the wielding of public, political power, most often set within the context of pluralistic and fragmented — or multilevel — polities.1 It has thus a dual connotation: on one hand, governance is about establishing norms and expectations that channel behaviour to enable or constrain activity; on the other hand, it is about engaging in deliberative activity that can compel or sanction individual and collective agency in myriad ways. These two aspects of governance come together within the context of decision making, where political agents deliberate and undertake actions that have concrete consequences for specific communities.
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Notes
See for example A. Prakash and J. A. Hart (eds). Globalization and Governance (London: Routledge, 1999)
M. Hewson and T. J. Sinclair (eds), Approaches to Global Governance Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999)
A. Baker, D. Hudson and R. Woodward (eds), Governing Financial Globalization (London: Routledge, 2005).
C. N. Murphy, ‘Global Governance: Poorly Done and Poorly Understood’, International Affairs, 76(4) (2000) p. 799.
M. Zürn, ‘Democratic Governance beyond the Nation-State: the EU and Other International Institutions’, European Journal of International Relations, 6(2) (2000) p. 186.
D. Held, Global Covenant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 102–5.
R. D. Germain, ‘Globalising Accountability within the International Organisation of Credit: Financial Governance and the Public Sphere’, Global Society, 18(2) (2004) pp. 217–42.
Hirschman stated that ‘to develop “voice” within an organization is synonymous with the history of democratic control through the articulation and aggregation of opinions and interests’. See A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 55.
For various portrayals of these changes, see M. Weber, Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974)
A. Morton, ‘The Age of Absolutism: Capitalism, the Modern States-system, and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 31(3) (2005) pp. 495–517
F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, ISth-lSth Century, Vol. 3: The Perspective of the World (London: William Collins, 1984).
See for example J. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
See for example D. Held, A. McGrew, J. Perraton and D. Goldblatt, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999)
P. G. Cerny, ‘Webs of Governance: the Privatization of Transnational Regulation’, in A. D. Andrews, C. R. Henning and L. W. Pauly (eds). Governing the World’s Money (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
It would be possible also to refer to this condition as one of ‘polyarchy’. However, this term is avoided is this chapter because of its association with the institutional functioning of democracy. As will be clear from below, democracy per se is not described, but rather the structural conditions within which governance is organized. For an excellent discussion of the limits of the term ‘polyarchy’, see W. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ch. 1.
A. Narlikar, International Trade and Developing Countries: Bargaining Coalitions in the GATT and WTO (London: Routledge, 2003).
On the failure of the MAI, see A. Walters, ‘NGOs, Business and Investment Rules: MAI, Seattle and beyond’. Global Governance, 7(1) (2001) pp. 51–73
R. Wilkinson, ‘Collapse at Cancún’, Global Governance, 10(2) (2004) pp. 149–55
R. Higgott and N. Phillips, ‘Challenging Triumphalism and Convergence: the Limits of Global Liberalization in Asia and Latin America’, Review of International Studies, 26(3) (2000) pp. 359–79.
See R. Wilkinson, The WTO, Crisis and the Governance of Global Trade (London: Routledge, 2006).
E. Kapstein, Governing the Global Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
M. R. King and T. J. Sinclair, ‘Private Actors and Public Policy: a Requiem for the New Basel Capital Accord’, International Political Science Review, 24(3) (2003) pp. 345–62
D. Wood, Governing Global Banking (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005).
R. D. Germain, ‘Financial Governance and the Public Sphere: Towards a Global Modality of Governance?’, Policy and Society, 23(3) (2004) pp. 68–90.
R. N. Cooper, ‘Prolegomena to the Choice of an International Monetary System’, International Organization, 29(1) (1975) pp. 63–97
E. Helleiner, States and the Re-emergence of Global Finance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)
E. Mayorbre (ed.), G24: the Developing Countries in the International Financial System (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).
M. Moran, The Politics of Banking: the Strange Case of Competition and Credit Control (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1984).
For a critique along these lines see J. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: WW. Norton & Co., 2002).
Convened at the behest of the US Treasury in April 1998, representatives from central banks and finance ministries of 22 countries met to discuss ways of strengthening the international financial system. This group later expanded to 33 countries before being in turn whittled down to the G20 grouping that was officially launched in September 1999. See S. Soederberg, The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture (London: Zed Books, 2004).
L. Mosley, ‘Attempting Global Standards: National Governments, International Finance, and the IMF’s Data Regime’, Review of International Political Economy, 10(2) (2003) pp. 331–62
T. Porter, ‘Technical Collaboration and Political Conflict in the Emerging Regime for International Financial Regulation’, Review of International Political Economy, 10(3) (2003) pp. 520–51.
See for example N. Woods, The Globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank and their Borrowers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)
T. Porter, ‘The Democratic Deficit in the Institutional Arrangements for Regulating Global Finance’, Global Governance, 7(4) (2001) pp. 427–39
For arguments along these lines, see Porter, ‘a’; Germain, ‘Globalising Accountability’; and J. A. Scholte, ‘Civil Society and the Governance of Global Finance’, in J. A. Scholte and A. Schnabel (eds). Civil Society and Global Finance (London: Routledge, 2002).
More generally, see Scholte and Schnabel, Civil Society and R. D. Germain and M. Kenny (eds). The Idea of Global Civil Society: Politics and Ethics in a Globalizing World (London: Routledge, 2005).
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© 2007 Randall D. Germain
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Germain, R.D. (2007). Between Anarchy and Hierarchy: Governance Lessons from Global Economic Institutions. In: DeBardeleben, J., Hurrelmann, A. (eds) Democratic Dilemmas of Multilevel Governance. Transformations of the State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591783_4
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