Title
Prof. Dr.
Last Name
Dingwerth
First name
Klaus
Email
klaus.dingwerth@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 2314
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PublicationForum: Global Governance: Decline or Maturation of an Academic Concept?This forum discusses contemporary scholarship on global governance in light of various problems that have commonly been associated with the global governance concept and literature. In the first contribution, Henk Overbeek maintains that global governance talk has undergone a profound transformation. While the concept initially referred to a radical restructuring of the global economic order, it is nowadays used as a reformist concept that seeks to accommodate the interests of neo-liberal globalization with relatively marginal reforms that are seen as necessary to keep the system running. Because definitions of global governance, including that of the Commission on Global Governance, tend to presuppose rather than question the existence of common interests and the willingness to cooperate at the global level, they serve to depoliticize the debate about world order. Moreover, the concept is analytically misleading given the rise of traditional forms of interstate bargaining that followed both the global financial crisis and the rise of the BRIC states. In the second contribution, Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg revisit the common critique that "global governance" is essentially a misnomer, as it overestimates the actual globality of existing governance schemes and as it portrays transboundary regulation as a mostly apolitical or post-political activity. Finding some truth in both claims, the authors however note that the more recent contributions to the global governance literature are very much aware of these conceptual challenges and frequently manage to address them without depriving the concept of global governance of its particular strengths. However, the authors identify a third challenge that has largely gone unnoticed thus far, namely the tendency of global governance research to almost exclusively focus on densely regulated policy areas while at the same time neglecting the more fundamental question why some issues become considered global governance issues and others not. In the third contribution, Daniel Compagnon brings the conceptual debate down to earth. He takes issue with the common claim that global governance ignores the South. As a matter of fact, and in spite of the structural imbalances in the distribution of power and resources in the global political economy, Third World countries have not been lacking overall influence both on the international state system and on transnational politics. Rather than assuming that Third World countries are structurally excluded from global governance, the author argues for a more nuanced and fact-based assessment of global governance in the South and the inclusion of Third World countries in global governance research.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
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PublicationWorld Politics and Organizational Fields: The Case of Transnational Sustainability GovernanceTransnational rule-making organizations have proliferated in the area of sustainability politics. In this article, we explore why these organizations share a set of core features that appear overly costly at first sight. We argue that norms that evolved out of the social interaction among transnational rule-making organizations account for this phenomenon. Thus, in the early 1990s, an organizational field of transnational rule-making has gradually developed in the field of environmental politics. Responding to a broader social discourse about global governance that stressed a need for innovative forms of cooperation among different societal sectors, this organizational field gained in legitimacy and strength. A set of commonly accepted core norms, the increasing density of interaction among the field's members, and the success and legitimacy ascribed to the field's key players by the outside world helped to solidify the organizational field until it eventually developed a ‘life of its own'.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 233 -
PublicationGlobal Governance as a Perspective on World PoliticsIn one of the first issues of Global Governance, Larry Finkelstein observed that "'Global Governance' appears to be virtually anything." A decade later, the concept of global governance has become ever more popular-and confusion about its meaning ever greater. While we do think that some flexibility in the use of concepts is both theoretically desirable and practically unavoidable, we believe that the current disarray is a hindrance to more fruitful discussions and to the goal of developing more coherent theories of global governance. We therefore argue that a more careful use of the term global governance is necessary to overcome the current confusion spawned by the variation in uses of the concept. After clarifying the basic function of concepts in social science and reviewing the different uses of global governance in the current literature, we use the term as an analytical concept that provides a perspective on world politics different from the more traditional notion of "international relations."Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 263 -
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PublicationActors, Arenas and Issues in Global GovernanceAn Internet search conducted in 1997 revealed 3418 references to ‘global governance’. In 2004, the number had risen to almost 200,000 references and by early 2008, the World Wide Web lists well over half-a-million pages that include the term ‘global governance’. The figures indicate not only a fast growth of the Internet itself but also an increasing familiarity of the term ‘global governance’. Academics and political practitioners are talking about it with ease, universities offer degrees and courses in global governance, and the bookshelves with the ‘GG’ label are quickly filling. But what is all this ‘global governance’ talk about?
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PublicationWirkungen transnationaler Umweltregime(Springer VS, 2007)