Global Governance Futures addresses the crucial importance of thinking through the future of global governance arrangements. It considers the prospects for the governance of world order approaching the middle of the twenty-first century by exploring today’s most pressing and enduring health, social, ecological, economic, and political challenges. Each of the expert contributors considers the drivers of continuity and change within systems of governance and how actors, agents, mechanisms, and resources are and could be mobilized.
The aim is not merely to understand state, intergovernmental, and non-state actors. It is also to draw attention to those underappreciated aspects of global governance that push understanding beyond strictures of traditional conceptualizations and offer better insights into the future of world order.
The book’s three parts enable readers to appreciate better the sum of forces likely to shape world order in the near and not-so-near future:
- “Planetary” encompasses changes wrought by continuing human domination of the earth; war; current and future geopolitical, civilizational, and regional contestations; and life in and between urban and non-urban environments.
- “Divides” includes threats to human rights gains; the plight of migrants; those who have and those who do not; persistent racial, gender, religious, and sexualorientation-based discrimination; and those who govern and those who are governed.
- “Challenges” involves food and health insecurities; ongoing environmental degradation and species loss; the current and future politics of international assistance and data; and the wrong turns taken in the control of illicit drugs and crime.
Designed to engage advanced undergraduate and graduate students in international relations, organization, law, and political economy as well as a general audience, this book invites readers to adopt both a backward- and forward-looking view of global governance. It will spark discussion and debate as to how dystopic futures might be avoided and change agents mobilized.
1. Making Sense of Global Governance Futures
Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson
PART I: PLANETARY
Introduction
2. Global Governance and the Anthropocene: Explaining the Escalating Global Crisis
Peter Dauvergne
3. War: The Governance of Violence and the Violence of Governance
Laura J. Shepherd
4. Geopolitics: Competition in an Age of Shared Global Threats
Thomas Hanson
5. Civilizations: Fusion or Clash?
Kishore Mahbubani
6. Regions and Regionalism: Confronting New Forms of Connectedness
Rosemary Foot
7. Cities: Understanding Global Urban Governance
Daniel Pejic and Michele Acuto
PART II: DIVIDES
Introduction
8. Human Rights after the West: Goodbye to All That
Stephen Hopgood
9. Migration Governance 2050: Utopia, Dystopia, or Heterotopia?
Alexander Betts
10. The Global Governance of Poverty and Inequality
David Hulme and Aarti Krishnan
11. Race: Apartheid Governance on a Global Scale
Robbie Shilliam
12. People: Who Governs and Who Is Governed?
Laura Sjoberg
PART III: CHALLENGES
Introduction
13. Food: Governance Challenges for a Hot and Hungry Planet
Jennifer Clapp
14. Health: Less Global, Less Health, Less Governance
Anne Roemer-Mahler
15. Climate Action: Beyond the Paris Agreement
Adriana Erthal Abdenur
16. Biodiversity: Protecting the Planetary Web of Life
Maria Ivanova and Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy
17. Aid: The COVID-19 Crisis and Beyond
Catherine Weaver and Rachel Rosenberg
18. Data: Global Governance Challenges
Madeline Carr and Jose Tomas Llanos
19. Illicit Drugs: Prohibition and the International Drug Control Regime
Mónica Serrano
Biography
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center, New York; he is also Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Korea.
Rorden Wilkinson is Professor of International Political Economy and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
