This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.

The issues that increasingly dominate the 21st century cannot be solved by any single country acting alone, no matter how powerful. To manage the global economy, prevent runaway environmental destruction, reign in nuclear proliferation, or confront other global challenges, we must cooperate. But at the same time, our tools for global policymaking - chiefly state-to-state negotiations over treaties and international institutions - have broken down. The result is gridlock, which manifests across areas via a number of common mechanisms. The rise of new powers representing a more diverse array of interests makes agreement more difficult. The problems themselves have also grown harder as global policy issues penetrate ever more deeply into core domestic concerns. Existing institutions, created for a different world, also lock-in pathological decision-making procedures and render the field ever more complex. All of these processes - in part a function of previous, successful efforts at cooperation - have led global cooperation to fail us even as we need it most. Ranging over the main areas of global concern, from security to the global economy and the environment, this book examines these mechanisms of gridlock and pathways beyond them. It is written in a highly accessible way, making it relevant not only to students of politics and international relations but also to a wider general readership.

This work is a collection of twenty-five articles previously published in Global Governance - one from each year of the journal’s existence – highlighting some of the best work published in the journal, along with an Introduction by the two editors Kurt Mills and Kendall Stiles.

The twenty-first century global community is confronted with unprecedented challenges as well as unique opportunities. The degree to which it can establish and institutionalize norms and mechanisms designed to promote and sustain meaningful global cooperation will determine the future course of civilization. This volume brings together a broad range of scholars to highlight some of the areas of contemporary transnational cooperation and to examine the scope and levels at which cooperation can and does take place. The study examines the issue of weapons of mass destruction, explores the promises of biotechnology and space technology, and investigates the roles of global conventions and institutions as strategies for addressing the common threats facing the international system. In short, the volume raises important, timely issues regarding the challenges and opportunities confronting the global community which both policy makers and academicians will find informative and thought-provoking in their efforts to understand the nature and complexity of the twenty-first century global community.

The Routledge International Handbook of Valuation and Society builds on the growing research interest in practices of valuation throughout contemporary society, providing an up-to-date overview of the different facets of research in the sociology of valuation. The handbook is divided into five major sections with attention to the treatment of valuation in major areas of sociological theory, as well as its key concepts, discourses, and approaches: Part I: Theoretical perspectives Part II: Central valuation practices in societal spheres Part III: Cross-cutting valuation practices Part IV: Valuation and societal change Part V: Reflections Together, the chapters in this book characterize distinctive practices of valuation across different societal spheres, such as education and science, arts and culture, economic life, the environment or digital culture and social media. They also examine the role of valuation in contemporary society and consider the ways it effects social change. This seminal handbook aims at taking stock of the development of the study of valuation with a selection of topics that are important for understanding core perspectives and developments as well as anticipating its future orientation. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in the ubiquity of the valuation practices and its effects on social life.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be. Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction—universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency—this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a “global challenge” unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields. The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.

Measuring governance has become an increasingly important feature of modern societies, with organizations and institutions expected to prove their worth by quantifying their activities and results. This unique Handbook maps historical developments, theoretical conceptions and key approaches, and summarizes what is known about measuring governance from a variety of fields of practice.