Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Introduces the idea of modes of governance to compare the causes and consequences of changes in global institutions.

"The Social Trends Institute (STI) is a non-profit international research center dedicated to fostering understanding of globally significant social trends. To this end, STI brings together the world's leading thinkers, taking an interdisciplinary and international approach. Currently, STI's areas of priority study are Family, Bioethics, Culture & Lifestyles, Governance, and Civil Society. Findings are disseminated to the media and through scholarly publications. The individuals and institutions that support STI share a conception of society and the individual that commands a deep respect for the equal dignity of human beings, and for freedom of thought, as well as a strong desire to contribute to social progress and the common good"--

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

Challenges tradition to show how developments in international relations repeat themselves; we may soon experience a return to past trends.

Friends and foes of international cooperation puzzle about how to explain order, stability, and predictability in a world without a central authority. How is the world governed in the absence of a world government? This probing yet accessible book examines "global governance" or the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions that help states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and transnational corporations identify, understand, and address trans-boundary problems. The chasm between the magnitude of a growing number of global threats - climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, financial instabilities, pandemics, to name a few - and the feeble contemporary political structures for international problem-solving provide compelling reasons to read this book. Fitful, tactical, and short-term local responses exist for a growing number of threats and challenges that require sustained, strategic, and longer-run global perspectives and action. Can the framework of global governance help us to better understand the reasons behind this fundamental disconnect as well as possible ways to attenuate its worst aspects? Thomas G. Weiss replies with a guardedly sanguine "yes".

The current international system of institutions and governance groups is proving inadequate to meet many of today's most important challenges, such as terrorism, poverty, nuclear proliferation, financial integration, and climate change. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and UN were founded after World War II, and their structures of voting power and representation have become obsolete, no longer reflecting today's balance of economic and political power. This insightful book examines how to make such institutions more responsive and effective. Institutional reform is critically needed but currently in stalemate. A new push is needed from powerful nations acting together through a reformed and enlarged G-8 that includes emerging economies, such as China and India. Global challenges demand integrated approaches, with greater coordination among international institutions. Global Governance Reform argues that without reconstituting the Group of 8 summit into a larger, more representative group of leaders, with a new mandate to provide strategic guidance to the system of international institutions, the world will fall further behind in addressing global challenges. The path to global reform is defined by the need to act in coordinated ways on summit and institutional reform, and this book lights the way.