The essays in this collection seek to reflect on global governance and to provide a better critical understanding of the various practices that fall under its rubric. The first part challenges the concept of global governance, the second part focuses on organizational and institutional aspects, and the last part examines the rule systems implemented by global governance practices. The vocabulary of (global) governance has become a serious contender to imagine world order in the post cold war world. Using different strategies of critique, the contributors argue that global governance denotes a political vocabulary where acts of definition themselves are political moves.

Showcases diverse theoretical approaches in the emerging area of global governance.

Nine well-known authors associated with the world federalist movement critique the 1995 Report of the Commission on Global Governance entitled Our Global Neighborhood. Although the contributors manifest a variety of viewpoints, styles, and approaches, they are unanimous in condemning the Report as insufficiently imaginative and visionary. Despite repeated calls in the Commission Report for a radically new way of thinking, the substance of the Report mindlessly rubber-stamps the legitimacy of the sovereign nation-state system of today, by means of summarily and peremptorily dismissing even the possibility of a supernational government qualitatively beyond the United Nations. According to the contributors, the concept of genuine world government is sufficiently advanced, and the circumstances of the present day are conducive, so that this concept is deserving of the most careful and serious attention by the general public and the political leadership. Despite their unconventional conclusions, these essays are lucid, judicious, and commanding.

Generally referring to all forms of social coordination and patterns of rule, the term 'governance' is used in many different contexts. In this Very Short Introduction, Mark Bevir explores the main theories of governance and considers their impact on ideas of governance in the corporate, public, and global arenas.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Institut für Politikwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Globalisation and Global Governance, language: English, abstract: [...] Clearly, the paper revolves around the normative concept of global governance. While in scientific literature, the normative concept of global governance has become unfashionable by the time and a rather critical analysis of the implication of international regulation has taken precedence, it will be outlined that there is good reason to investigate the connection between the UN and the normative concept. By no means does this foreclose the importance of critical scrutiny of the establishing governance architecture. The criticism of global governance as the perpetuation of neoliberal hegemony and Western domination is acknowledged but will not be dealt with from this point on. Surprisingly little effort been made so far to systematically link the concept of global governance, be it normative or analytical, to the United Nations system although on a gut level, scholars seem to agree that both are somehow linked. At the start of the analysis, this paper sets out to present a first useful framework put forth by Brühl and Rosert (Brühl/Rosert 2007) and adds a missing category to the analysis, the link between the UN and the normative concept of global governance. In the normative tradition, the developed framework inter alia proposes to consider the UN as a potential activator for global governance as a normative concept. While the connection of global governance and the UN as its activator offers room for gripping research, the ambition of this paper is much downgraded. It only seeks to offer a starting point by investigating whether the UN can actually advance global governance and tries to enable a first cautious approach to the more general hypothesis above. To facilitate this analysis, in a first step a major problem of global governance is selected. The fundamental lack of integration of non-state actors into governance structures serves as a case in point for that matter. The legitimacy of global governance suffers from this lack which in turn impedes reaping the desired benefits of the concept. In a second step, the UN’s capacity to solve the depicted problem is analysed. [...]

This collection presents Thomas G. Weiss' most important contributions to debates on UN Reform, non-state actors and global governance and humanitarian action in a turbulent world.

The sequencing of the entire human genome has opened up unprecedented possibilities for healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas about how these can be achieved, particularly in developing countries. UNESCO’s Bioethics Programme was established to address such issues in 1993. Since then, it has adopted three declarations on human genetics and bioethics (1997, 2003 and 2005), set up numerous training programmes around the world and debated the need for an international convention on human reproductive cloning. Negotiating Bioethics presents Langlois' research on the negotiation and implementation of the three declarations and the human cloning debate, based on fieldwork carried out in Kenya, South Africa, France and the UK, among policy-makers, geneticists, ethicists, civil society representatives and industry professionals. The book examines whether the UNESCO Bioethics Programme is an effective forum for (a) decision-making on bioethics issues and (b) ensuring ethical practice. Considering two different aspects of the UNESCO Bioethics Programme – deliberation and implementation – at international and national levels, Langlois explores: how relations between developed and developing countries can be made more equal who should be involved in global level decision-making and how this should proceed how overlap between initiatives can be avoided what can be done to improve the implementation of international norms by sovereign states how far universal norms can be contextualized what impact the efficacy of national level governance has at international level Drawing on extensive empirical research, Negotiating Bioethics presents a truly global perspective on bioethics. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics, science and technology studies, bioethics, anthropology, international relations, and public health. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.