Rethinking Global Governance: Cooperation in a World of Power

While all these areas and many others demand global governance, the reality is that we live in a world with limited global cooperation. Policies are determined by domestic politicians, based on “national interest.” The nation state remains the principal locus of political accountability. Moreover, some types of global governance can backfire when they privilege powerful countries (or special interests within them) instead of addressing common challenges. These and other considerations we discuss below imply that we should not be too demanding of global institutions—or perhaps more accurately, we can and should ask a great deal, but we should see these as aspirations of an ideal world; taking into account political realities, a more circumscribed, less ambitious global agenda may be preferable. Accordingly, we advance here a framework for a minimal global governance architecture.

In what follows, we first outline some general principles that should govern the design of global governance and provide their justification. The next section discusses the reasons, both positive and normative, for our minimal conception of global governance. In the remaining sections of the paper, we draw the implications of these ideas in a variety of arenas: IPR, trade, financial flows, monetary policy, investment agreements, management of debt. Our principles help guide us to areas where we should be hopeful of the possibility of good agreements (green lighted), areas where such agreements should be widely circumscribed (red lighted), and areas where we should proceed with extreme caution (yellow lighted).