On Global Governance: Critical Discourses and Practices

The concept of global governance has been much discussed over the past decade, since the publication in 1995 of the report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood . This collection provides an assessment of global governance as a discourse and practice, situating national and international attempts to respond to several challenges. These challenges the ‘shrinking’ of the ‘global neighbourhood;’ the emergence of a global civil society; the rising interdependence among both state and non-state actors within international society; and the rise in the number and complexity of transnational issues in conjunction with the failure or inability of national governments to deal with them while providing common goods and security guarantees for their citizens. Examining the idea of global governance from a number of different perspectives, both theoretical and empirical, the contributors to On Global Governance raise the limits of the practices of global governance as they have been characterised in the past ten years. The collection provides readers with both case studies and firm theoretical grounding, thereby allowing a broader understanding and a firmer position from which to critique.