Summary
'International Governance' required readings summary 2024/2025
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Summary of all the exam chapters of the book 'International Govenance'. Lectured at Leiden University in 2024/2025.
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WEEK 1Samenvatting literatuur 1 blz. 3 t/m 18
Global governance is significantly different today than in the early twentieth century. The fist attempt
at building world institutions under the League of Nations was beginning. Previously international
governance was exercised through private actors, ad hoc mechanisms and an older European system of
diplomacy. The current system is under significant pressure not only form the pandemic but also
longer-run questions of relevance, over-stretch, ineffectiveness and omission. These issues are not only
from recent years but also from longer-run issues that underscore the importance of understanding
international organization and global governance.
Since that time states have experimented with alternative intergovernmental arrangements such as the
G7/8 group and the G20 group being the most prominent. Also, less health-giving actors have become
embroiled in the governance of global affairs, such as private military and security companies in
arenas of conflict.
The way that these actors and mechanisms are arranged in relationship to one another, the power that
underpins them, and the ideas and ideologies that drive their overall assemblage are not as central to
the study of international relations (IR) as they ought to be.
Bringing international organization and global governance to the fore
To the detriment of understanding global governance, international organization and global
governance have tended to be a combination of all or some of the following elements:
The activities of the UN and other major international organizations
Subsets of the broader field of IR
The preserve of normative and idealistic projects concerned with making the world a better
place.
The low politics of mundane bureaucracies working on more technical economic,
environmental, and social issues and not the high politics of security, warfare, and defense:
and
Conspiracies about world government.
Little clarity exists about the core meanings, overlaps, and contradictions of IR, international
organization and global governance. Sometimes these are even used synonymously…
International organizational and global governance: one to another
International organization refers to an instance – or, in an historical sense, a moment – of
institutionalization in relations among states.
Inis Claude: ‘’International organization is a process; international organizations are representative
aspects of the phase of that process which has been reached at a given time’’
International organizations are more formal intergovernmental bureaucracies with legal standing,
physical headquarters, executive head, staff and substantive focus for their operations. Example:
WIPO. The WEF is not intergovernmental and more of an international institution. International
institutions are broader. Whereas international organizations are formalized bureaucracies. The G7 and
G-77 groups for example are instances of international organization, but they are not necessarily
international organizations.
International regimes are slightly different again. Although they are related Stephen Krasner’s
formulation remains the most widely accepted: ‘’implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and
,decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of
international relations.’’ Beside that this is almost synonyms of international institutions – international
regimes are more accurately viewed as the range of activities that are, in part, created by the behavior-
shaping effects of international organizations and institutions. For example, the international trade
regime.
Global governance is different from the field of international organization and related work on
international institutions and regimes. Global governance refers to the totality of the ways, formal and
informal, the world is governed. Global governance and international organizations are related, but in
no way synonymous or coterminous. International organizations are essential and visible aspects of
how the world is currently governed. International organizations are primarily states and emphasizes
intergovernmental organizations (IGO’s), global governance is much broader. But the emphasis on
states misses examples of steps in issue-specific global governance. For example: the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Federation Internationalé de Football Association (FIFA).
Less obvious forms such as the International Organization of Standardization are also forms of
international governance.
Thinking differently about global governance
Global governance should provide ample insights into the differing forms of overarching world orders
that have existed – and which need further investigation to unravel the full range of means by which
they were and are held together.
Samenvatting literatuur blz. 19 t/m 22
Students often do not get the whole story about building an institution and often try to get the whole
field of study in as little as time possible. The end of a war and the want to not slide back into
hostilities for example, do not offer a sufficiently rounded account of the slow and incremental
struggles and processes that lie behind the emergence of international organizations or of the dramatic
acceleration of transformational moments in history.
WEEK 2
Who governs the globe?
Samenvatting literatuur blz. 73 t/m 86
Philanthropist such as Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Bill gates seem to govern the world
through initiatives. Scholars and policymakers are starting to come to grips with these implications of
these actors for global governance. Many scholars believe in the international system of sovereign
states who answer to none. They are all evenly sovereign but some lack capabilities to tackle global
problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics. Scholars seek to strategize
these global problems and possibilities for an alternative future.
At the same time multilateral interstate treaty-making seems to be on the decline, with bilateral,
regional, plurilateral, and private initiatives gaining ground. The new actors and new forms of global
governance raises questions such as: who are the global governors? What do they do? Why does
anyone defer to them? What are the relationships between various governors? What are the
relationships between governors and the governed? To whom are they accountable? Whom do they
represent? On what basis can one evaluate their legitimacy?
, History and development
Kenneth Waltz argues that the world is an anarchy, the absence of world government. Recently
scholars have highlighted its heterarchical nature as ‘overlapping and partly competing institutions’
and ‘structures of super- and subordination’. Many accept that global governance is not synonymous
with cooperation and that it advances some interests at the expense of others.
Robert Keohane’s rationalist functionalism argues that global needs gave rise to governance
arrangements. Despite anarchy states cooperated because it provided benefits such as reduced
transaction costs, information and discouraged cheating and free riding. This thinking was embedded
in American hegemonial thinking and offered no insight in substance and who is benefitted by
international governance. 4 important developments in the 80s and 90s prompted new thinking:
1. Rapid pace of economic globalization more tightly connected people across space and time
2. Economic privatization and deregulation increased the social power of private actors.
3. The development of new information and communication technologies radically compressed
space and time
4. The end of the Cold War ushered in a period of commitment and optimism about international
cooperation.
James Rosenau and Philip Cerny revealed the poor fit between a system of territorially based states
and the rapid process of globalization and emphasized the bigger role that private actors were playing.
Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal identified multiple combinations of types of governors in their
‘governance triangle’ to capture interactions and partnership between the three points of the triangle:
NGOs, firms and states.
Governors and their authority
Global governors are authorities who exercise power across borders for purposes of affecting policy.
Governors thus create issues, set agendas, establish and implement rules or programs, and evaluate
and/or adjudicate outcomes. Governors can be NGOs, civil society campaigns, experts,
intergovernmental organizations, states, regulators, judges, lobbyists, business firms, and hybrid
networks blending multiple types of actors.
Existing works tells us however that transnational advocacy networks are less likely to be included in
finance and security policy yet are more likely to be included in human rights, environment and
development issues.
The authority of global governors can come from multiple places. It can be institutional authority,
delegated authority, principle-based authority expertise-based authority and capacity-based authority,
the last two are related to each other. But the latter leans to more of a track record than an expertise.
Authority can also conflict expertise for example when a governor has authority over something he
has no expertise in.
Governors’ relationships between each other and with their institutional environment can shape
outcomes. Governors can exaggerate their reports to gain better merits for future contracts.
The limits of ‘thin state consent’
International governance, treaties and international law are based upon ‘thin state consent’. Many
global governors navigate between thin state consent and stakeholder consent. Stakeholders being the
rule-makers, the governors and the governed. More informal processes, non-state actors, and networks
that strive for more robust, or thick stakeholder consensus are edging out the traditional state-centric
modes of global governance.
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