This volume continues the inquiry launched by the Royal Society of Canada's 1997 publication, "Can Canada Survive? Under What Terms and Conditions?", and pursued in the 1998 volume, "The Well-Being of Canada", and the 1999 volume "Survivability in the 21st Century" (all published by the University of Toronto Press). The present collection examines the challenges of governance in our new century. Eight papers, given by experts in their respective fields, call for an examination of the governance of organizations per se, whether one probes the crises in the experience of large corporations, in education, in health care, in science and technology systems, or in military affairs. This volume underlines the dramatic changes taking place in our time and stresses the urgent need for new thinking and the need to reform our governance mechanisms in order to keep pace with our changing world.

On cover: Future studies.

This book explores some of the opportunities and risks - economic, social and technological - that decision-makers will have to address, and outlines what needs to be done to foster society's capacity to manage its future more flexibly and with broader participation of its citizens.

For decades, liberal democracy has been extolled as the best system of governance to have emerged out of the long experience of history. Today, such a confident assertion is far from self-evident. Democracy, in crisis across the West, must prove itself. In the West today, the authors argue, we no longer live in "industrial democracies," but "consumer democracies" in which the governing ethos has ended up drowning households and governments in debt and resulted in paralyzing partisanship. In contrast, the long-term focus of the decisive and unified leadership of China is boldly moving its nation into the future. But China also faces challenges arising from its meteoric rise. Its burgeoning middle class will increasingly demand more participation, accountability of government, curbing corruption and the rule of law. As the 21st Century unfolds, both of these core systems of the global order must contend with the same reality: a genuinely multi-polar world where no single power dominates and in which societies themselves are becoming increasingly diverse. The authors argue that a new system of "intelligent governance" is required to meet these new challenges. To cope, the authors argue that both East and West can benefit by adapting each other’s best practices. Examining this in relation to widely varying political and cultural contexts, the authors quip that while China must lighten up, the US must tighten up. This highly timely volume is both a conceptual and practical guide of impressive scope to the challenges of good governance as the world continues to undergo profound transformation in the coming decades.