New and Emerging Players in Global Governance
Problems and Issues
Statement of the problem
Non-state institutions, such as foundations and international civil society organizations, have opened new public grounds and side-stepped states and markets in shaping the international political agenda in the areas of economic and development cooperation, environment, access to knowledge and information.
Transnational corporations directly influence and control the central mechanisms of expansion of the global market, such as technology transfers, direct investments and innovation. In a technology- and information-driven process of growth, corporations set the pace, style and direction of economic and social change on a global scale.
Moreover, the current cycle of technology-driven globalization has created singular economic contradictions between the transformative capacity of technology and processes of economic management, and modalities of organizing political life. Innovations in product and process technologies have made production flexible and independent from traditional scarcities and geographic constraints. Barriers to modernization of infrastructures are easier to surmount and technical solutions for many development problems are at hand.
However, these enabling and empowering possibilities of technology, which in fact represent new common goods, are completely delinked from the world of politics and governance. A gap emerges between the power of new strategic players to influence and effectively shape decisions at the global level and the instruments for policy-making and governance available at the national level, that are grossly inadequate to meet the challenges of “glocalization”.
Issues to be highlighted
- What are the implications of the erosion of authority of the national state and the increasing demand for policy-making with regard to global issues?
- What new modalities of political engagement and participation can be devised to incorporate the new global players into the governance debate?
- What changes in existing political mechanisms of representation and accountability are required to deal with the power divide between economic global players and existing structures of democratic representation?