Rethinking Global Governance: Cooperation in a World of Power

Today, the world is highly integrated and interdependent. Climate change affects all; emissions from one country can have devastating global effects. Viruses know no international borders. For more than 200 years, a basic lesson of economics has been that lowering trade barriers contributes to higher standards of living by allowing for greater specialisation and taking advantage of comparative advantages. Knowledge produced in one country can be of benefit to the whole world.1While these areas and many others demand global governance, the world possesses limited global cooperation. Policies are determined by domestic politicians based on ‘national interest’; the nation-state remains the principal locus of political accountability. Taking into account such a political reality, a more circumscribed, less ambitious global agenda may be preferable. This chapter thus advances a framework for minimal global governance architecture. First, some general principles that should govern the design of global governance are outlined, and their justifications are provided. The next section discusses the reasons—both positive and normative—for the minimal conception of global governance. In the remaining sections, implications of these ideas are drawn from a variety of arenas—intellectual property rights, trade, financial flows, monetary policy, investment agreements, and management of debt. Principles help examine the possibility of good agreements (green-lighted), areas where agreements should be widely circumscribed (red-lighted), and areas where agreements should occur under extreme caution (yellow-lighted).