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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
It is now conventional wisdom to see the great policy challenges of the 21st century as inherently transnational. It is equally common to note the failures of the international institutions the world relies on to address such challenges. As the acclaimed 2013 book Gridlock argued, the world increasingly needs effective international cooperation, but multilateralism appears unable to deliver it in the face of deepening interdependence, rising multipolarity, and the growing complexity and fragmentation that characterise the global order. The Gridlock authors have now partnered with a group of leading experts to offer a trenchant reassessment of elements of the argument. Comparing anomalies and exceptions to multilateral dysfunction across a number of spheres of world politics, Beyond Gridlock explores seven pathways through and beyond gridlock. While multilateralism continues to fall short, Beyond Gridlock identifies systematic means to avoid or resist these forces and turn them into collective solutions. This book offers a vital new perspective on world politics as well as a practical guide for positive change in global policy.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Abbreviations
Notes on the Authors
Preface
1: Introduction
The
Gridlock
Argument
Gridlock
Revisited
Looking beyond
Gridlock
: Anomalies and Exceptions
Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Theorizing Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Normative Considerations of Moving beyond Gridlock
Structure of the Book
Notes
2: Finance
The Global Financial System: A Complex Organizational Ecology
Continued Gridlock or Forward Momentum Out?
Prospects for the Future
Civil Society's Potential Contribution out of Gridlock
Assertion of Autonomous Agency within and among Technocratic Organizations
Conclusion
Notes
3: Monetary Policy
Growing Multipolarity, Harder Problems and Institutional Inertia: The Gridlock in Monetary Cooperation
Which Pathways Lead through and beyond Gridlock in Global Monetary Cooperation?
Beyond Gridlock? Technical Groups with Effective Processes and Autonomous and Innovative International Organizations
Conclusion
Notes
4: Trade
The Multilateral Trade Environment: History, Architecture, and Successes
Absence and Presence of Gridlock in Trade
Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Conclusion: Reinvigorating the Multilateral Trading System
5: Investment
Contemporary Investment Governance and Its Gridlock
Pathways out of Gridlock in Investment Governance
Conclusion: Who Benefits from Investment Governance?
Notes
6: Energy
The Current Energy Picture
Gridlock and Beyond in Fossil Fuel Governance
The New Energy World: Technological Transformation?
Potential Shifts in Great Power Interests
Proliferating Institutions and Changing Technocratic Institutions: The Empirical Evidence
Where Next: Evaluating Institutional Change as a Pathway beyond Gridlock
Conclusion
Notes
7: Humanitarianism
Humanitarianism as Global Policy
Contemporary Humanitarian Context
Humanitarian Governance Failures: Forced Migration and Gridlock in Focus
Pathways through Gridlock for Forced Migration
Conclusion: Balancing Optimism with Pragmatic Futures
8: Human Rights
Governance Arrangements in the Human Rights Domain
Pathways out of Gridlock
Trends and Prospects for Overcoming Gridlock in Human Rights Governance
Notes
9: Health
Pathways to Gridlock in the Global Health Regime
Through and beyond Global Health Gridlock
Conclusion
10: Climate Change
The Descent into Gridlock over Two Decades of Climate Diplomacy
From Copenhagen to Paris: Shifting from a Regulatory Regime to a Catalytic Regime
Which Pathways Are Driving This Change?
Beyond Gridlock in Climate Change?
11: Cyber Security
The Cyber Threat: Origins of the Problem
The Sources of the Problem: Power Transition and Growing Complexity
Prospective Pathways through Cyber Gridlock
Conclusion: Transitional Problems, Harder Problems, and the Merging of Systems
Notes
12: Weapons of Mass Destruction
The WMD Control Regime
Regime Gridlock
Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Pathways beyond Gridlock?
Notes
13: Conclusion
Self-Reinforcing Gridlock and the Rise of Nationalism
Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Breaking the Hold of Gridlock and the Anti-global Backlash?
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Gridlock trends and their mechanisms
Table 1.2 Pathways through and beyond gridlock and their mechanisms
Table 1.3 Pathways through and beyond gridlock across areas of world politics examined in this book
Table 3.1 Institutional fragmentation in the international monetary system: regional arrangements in US dollars created or reinforced by the G20 emerging countries after the 2008 crisis
Table 3.2 Institutional fragmentation in the international monetary system: arrangements in national currencies created by the G20 emerging countries after the 2008 crisis
Table 7.1 Pathways out of gridlock in forced migration
Table 8.1 Pathways through or beyond gridlock in human rights governance
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 International organizations and their offshoots, absolute number (bars) and annual rate of growth (line)
Source
: Union of International Associations 2016.
Figure 2.1 The proliferation of global financial regulatory standards, 1983–2015
Source
: Financial Stability Board, data compiled by Stefano Pagliari.
Figure 2.2 Bank lending in international and domestic components, 2000–2014 (US$ trillions)
Note
: International time series measures international bank claims on a consolidated and immediate borrower basis. Domestic time series measures local currency claims on local residents on an immediate borrower basis.
Source
: Bank for International Settlements database.
Figure 3.1 Foreign exchange reserve accumulation in G20 emerging countries in Asia and Latin America, 1990–2015
Source:
World Bank.
Figure 13.1 Self-reinforcing gridlock
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
Copyright © Polity 2017
The right of Polity to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1571-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1572-1(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hale, Thomas (Thomas Nathan), editor. | Held, David, editor.
Title: Beyond gridlock / [edited by] Thomas Hale, David Held.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004155 (print) | LCCN 2017022001 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509515745 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509515752 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509515714 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509515721 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: International cooperation. | Economic policy--International cooperation. | Environmental policy--International cooperation. | Globalization--Political aspects. | World politics.
Classification: LCC JZ1318 (ebook) | LCC JZ1318 .B483 2017 (print) | DDC 337--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004155
Typeset in 10.5 on 13 pt Swift
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 International organizations and their offshoots, absolute number and annual rate of growth
2.1 The proliferation of global financial regulatory standards, 1983–2015
2.2 Bank lending in international and domestic components, 2000–2014
3.1 Foreign exchange reserve accumulation in G20 emerging countries in Asia and Latin America, 1990–2015
13.1 Self-reinforcing gridlock
Tables
1.1 Gridlock trends and their mechanisms
1.2 Pathways through and beyond gridlock and their mechanisms
1.3 Pathways through and beyond gridlock across areas of world politics examined in this book
3.1 Institutional fragmentation in the international monetary system: regional arrangements in US dollars created or reinforced by the G20 emerging countries after the 2008 crisis
3.2 Institutional fragmentation in the international monetary system: arrangements in national currencies created by the G20 emerging countries after the 2008 crisis
7.1 Pathways out of gridlock in forced migration
8.1 Pathways through or beyond gridlock in human rights governance
Abbreviations
Notes on the Authors
Garrett Wallace Brown is Professor of Political Theory and Global Health Policy in the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His research includes work on cosmopolitanism, globalization theory, global justice, international law and global health governance. He has published widely on issues in global health and has recently published Global Health Policy (2014) and The Global Politics of Health Reform in Africa (2015). His current Medical Research Council research is investigating whether performance-based financing is an effective policy mechanism for African health system strengthening.
Michael Clarke was Professor of Defence Studies at King's College London from 1995 and was the Director General of the Royal United Services Institute from 2007 to 2015. He remains Visiting Professor at King's and also at the University of Exeter and is a Specialist Advisor both to the House of Commons Defence Committee and to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. In 2016 he began chairing an Inquiry into drone warfare on behalf of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones.
Camila Villard Duran is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of São Paulo. She was an Associate Fellow of the Oxford-Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship Program run by the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2014–2016). Camila Villard Duran was awarded her joint-PhD degree in Law by the University of São Paulo and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2009–2012). She works on issues related to regulation of money and finance, international economic law, the sociology of economic law, and central bank swaps.
Ann Florini is Professor of Public Policy, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, and Academic Director of SMU's Master of Tri-Sector Collaboration. She is also Non-resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She is an authority on new approaches to global governance. Her work currently focuses on the roles of tri-sector collaborations involving government, civil society and the private sector in addressing global issues. Her books include China Experiments: From Local Innovation to National Reform (with Hairong Lai and Yeling Tan, 2012); The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World (2007); The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World (2003); and The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (2000).
Thomas Hale is Associate Professor of Public Policy (Global Public Policy) at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His research explores how we can manage transnational problems effectively and fairly. He seeks to explain how political institutions evolve – or not – to face the challenges raised by globalization and interdependence, with a particular emphasis on environmental and economic issues. His books include Between Interests and Law: The Politics of Transnational Commercial Disputes (2015), Transnational Climate Change Governance (with Harriet Bulkeley et al., 2014) and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (with David Held and Kevin Young, 2013).
David Held is Master of University College, Durham and Professor of Politics and International Relations at Durham University. Among his publications are Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (with Thomas Hale and Kevin Young, 2013), Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (2010), Globalization/Anti-Globalization (with Anthony McGrew, 2007), Models of Democracy (2006), Global Covenant (2004), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (with Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, 1999), and Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (1995). His main research interests include the study of globalization, changing forms of democracy and the prospects of regional and global governance. He is a Director of Polity Press, which he co-founded in 1984, and General Editor of Global Policy.
Lucas Kello is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University. He serves as Director of the Cyber Studies Programme, a major research and teaching initiative on all aspects of the modern information society. He is also Co-Director of the university's interdisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security.
Andreas Klasen is Professor of International Business at Offenburg University, Senior Honorary Fellow at Durham University and Visiting Fellow at Newcastle Business School. Previously, he was a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Managing Director of the official German Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agency. Until 2014, he also served as Berne Union Vice President. His research focuses on trade, innovation and economic development.
Kyle McNally is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Global Policy Institute at Durham University. His current research is focused on humanitarianism, global health governance and forced migration policy. His publications include an upcoming book entitled Internal Displacement (2017) and Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century (co-editor and contributing author, 2014). Kyle McNally was awarded his PhD from Durham University and his MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
James Orbinski has over 30 years of international experience in humanitarian medicine, having worked in situations of war, genocide, famine and epidemic disease. He was international president of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders from 1998 to 2001. He is Professor and CIGI Research Chair in Global Health at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Laurier University. He is also a full Professor at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health. His research touches on humanitarian medicine, emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, global health governance, and the global health impacts of climate change.
Tom Pegram is Senior Lecturer in Global Governance at University College London and the Deputy Director of the UCL Global Governance Institute. He completed his DPhil in Politics from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests lie at the boundaries of global governance, international organizations, and the transnational politics of human rights implementation. He is co-editor of Human Rights, State Compliance, and Social Change: Assessing National Human Rights Institutions (with Ryan Goodman, 2012) and his scholarly articles have appeared in International Organization, European Journal of International Relations, Human Rights Quarterly and Governance, among others.
Taylor St John is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at PluriCourts, University of Oslo, and a Senior Research Associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme, University of Oxford. Her research concerns the international architecture for investment dispute resolution and the politics of foreign investment more generally. Her book The Rise of Investor–State Arbitration: Law, Politics, and Unintended Consequences will be published in 2017.
Kevin Young is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and works on the political economy of financial market regulation, elite networks and transnational governance. He is co-author of Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need it Most (2013) and has published widely, in journals such as Regulation and Governance, Journal of Banking Regulation, Review of International Political Economy, Business and Politics, Socio-Economic Review and Public Administration.
Preface
There are increasing signs that the liberal international order created after 1945 now verges on collapse. While populism and nationalism are on the rise across the world, asserting the claims of particular peoples and places, we are more linked than ever before. These links require global cooperation and careful management. And yet we are not rising to this challenge. A series of global collective action problems, from the spread of weapons of mass destruction to climate change, threaten to render our societies weaker, poorer, and more violent. There is a substantial risk that humankind may not end the twenty-first century as well as we began it.
How these existential challenges are governed, and why their governance has been so inadequate, has preoccupied us for many years. In Gridlock: Why Multilateralism Is Failing When We Need It Most, published with Kevin Young in 2013, we sought to understand and explain the achievements and the limits of the postwar order. We concluded that deep structural trends, rooted in the extraordinary success of international cooperation and the transformations it allowed, now undermined its continued effectiveness and responsiveness. We set out a bleak picture of how gridlock paralyses multilateral governance, with dangerous implications.
This grim picture has stayed with us, and in some cases darkened further. However, it does not capture significant anomalies to the argument. Across world politics, some resilient pathways endure, and new pathways of change unfold. Over the last three years we have explored and examined these exceptions, and tried to understand the balance between the pressures of gridlock, on the one side, and pressures for change, on the other. Without understanding these trends, we cannot begin to break the cycle of gridlock.
Beyond Gridlock is distinctive in two ways. First, it offers a unique and comprehensive insight into political stasis and change at the global level – what works, and why, and where. Second, it has been written in an innovative way, drawing on the expertise of outstanding academics and policy experts working in a diverse range of problem areas. We brought this group together twice, once in Durham in 2015 and once in Oxford in 2016. These were far-ranging and intense discussions in which expertise on specific topics came into dialogue with arguments concerning cross-cutting global trends. This process laid the foundations for the work on this book, which began as an edited volume of essays but ended as a highly integrated, multi-authored text that deploys jointly developed theoretical and analytic tools. The result is an original and comparative analysis of the fundamental challenges of global governance in the twenty-first century.
We would like to thank all those who contributed in these discussions. These include all the contributors to this book, as well as Oliver Stuenkel, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Seyom Brown, Eva Maria Nag, Robert Wade, and Saba Mahmood. We also thank the Global Challenges Foundation for their support of the two workshops. Finally, Polity Press has been hugely supportive; we thank everyone there for their professionalism.
Thomas Hale and David Held
Oxford and Durham, 2017
1IntroductionPathways beyond Gridlock
Thomas Hale and David Held
Conventional wisdom now sees the greatest challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century as inherently transnational. From climate change, to economic stability, to deadly pathogens, to migration, to criminal networks, to terrorism, the issues governments must address often ignore the borders that divide political authority between sovereign states. It is no exaggeration to maintain that human welfare depends more than ever before on effective transborder governance at all scales.
Conventional wisdom also holds that we lack the effective international cooperation we need to meet transnational challenges. Contemporary global governance has been called “unfit for purpose” (Goldin 2013), in a state of “permanent deficit” (Lamy 2014), and, in our own formulation, increasingly “gridlocked” (Hale, Held and Young 2013). Even while our need for cooperation grows, our ability to achieve it seems to be flagging.
The dangers of persistent gridlock in global governance are difficult to overstate. As our response to collective action problems fractures, states devise strategies in isolation and according to short-term self-interest. These challenges have grown even starker in recent years as nationalism has risen in nearly every corner of the world. This anti-global backlash can be seen as part of a negative cycle that compounds gridlock. In part driven by a failure to manage globalization and interdependence effectively, nationalism further erodes our ability to cooperate through international institutions. It is, at one and the same time, a consequence of gridlock and a reinforcing factor.
While the conventional wisdom carries considerable weight, it is time for a reassessment. Any evaluation of our capacity to resolve twenty-first century challenges needs to be mindful of the complexities and nuances that characterize individual problems. Not all areas of world politics exhibit the same degree of gridlock. Moreover, beneath the surface of deadlock and drift, movements can be detected which, in a number of cases, reveal instances of policy reform and fresh pathways through crises. Such developments emerge from varying circumstances. For example, in the climate realm shifting institutional models at the 2015 Paris climate summit helped recalibrate the regime after the two decades of lacklustre multilateral negotiations. Questions about the future ability of the International Monetary Fund to manage global crises come alongside new arrangements for monetary cooperation in the global South. And in trade, the death of multilateral negotiations in the Doha Round and “mega-regional” trade agreements across the Atlantic and Pacific has coincided with other proposals, such as China's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or the “One Belt, One Road” programme of investment to link the economies of Central and Southeast Asia. In sum, gridlock is a central condition of contemporary global governance, but is it the whole story?
This book takes the dominant trends that cause gridlock and stagnation in international cooperation as a starting point, but, at the same time, asks if there are systematic pathways through or beyond gridlock that we can detect and build on. The pages that follow do not simply attempt to list exceptions or qualifications. Rather, any good theory must use anomalies to consider if such evidence reinforces, alters, or even overturns previous understandings. Our goal, then, is not just to assess gridlock, but to learn something more general about the patterns through which, and conditions under which, multilateral blockages are created, adapted to, and potentially overcome in contemporary world politics.
To achieve this, the book compares different issue areas. It explores gridlock, and systematic exceptions to it, in global governance and uses the results of that analysis to evaluate prospects for more effective global governance going forward. We focus on a significant range of policy sectors in order to explore whether and how change is possible. By identifying pathways through and beyond gridlock in these sectors, the book shows which pathway (or pathways) explain change in which policy sectors, and why. It allows a comparison of what works where, and thereby helps illuminate which pathways are most likely to yield significant policy shifts in the direction of a more effective governance, and under what circumstances. While this book is, at core, a social scientific effort to compare current and past trends in global governance, it is prospective and normative as well.
This introduction begins by recalling the thesis set out in the book Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most (Hale, Held and Young 2013). The sections that follow highlight the debate about this book and criticisms levelled at it; identify exceptions and anomalies that compromise, qualify, or enrich the argument; and explore the steps needed to examine how gridlock can be overcome. It remains our judgement that the dynamics discussed in the following chapters do not overturn the relevance of the core gridlock argument (see below); rather, they explore and highlight how global governance can adapt, modulate, and even succeed despite – and even, in some cases, because of – gridlock. In this way, the book seeks to create an evidence base for more effective management of global challenges in the twenty-first century.
The Gridlock Argument
The impetus for Gridlock came from the observation, particularly commonplace around the start of the decade, that multilateral institutions had stalled across issue domains ranging from the Copenhagen climate summit, to the Doha trade round, to the inability to agree effective financial regulation in the wake of the 2008–9 crisis. The book attempted to offer a general explanation for this phenomenon that made sense of various trends in world politics.
Gridlock is defined as the inability of countries to cooperate via international institutions to address policy problems that span borders. It refers both to deadlock or dysfunctionality in existing organizations and the inability of countries to come to new agreements as issues arise. If we look only at the creation of new international institutions, just one useful indicator for gridlock, we find some disturbing trends. The bars in figure 1.1 show the number of international organizations, plus their offshoots, in the world from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. The line shows the rate of growth of these organizations from year to year. Two striking trends are clear. First, there has been an explosion of formal global governance in the years since World War II, with several thousand international organizations now operating in every domain of human activity. Second, the creation of new international organizations has now essentially stopped, even as interdependence reaches new levels. While there is of course more to gridlock than just the creation of new international institutions, the trend exemplifies the larger problem.1
Figure 1.1
International organizations and their offshoots, absolute number (bars) and annual rate of growth (line)
Source
: Union of International Associations 2016.
The primary goal in Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most was to explain the growing stagnation and deadlock in multilateral governance. We were not alone in recognizing the difficulties of multilateralism at the time (Narlikar 2010a; Victor 2011b; Goldin 2013). At least one book has made the counter-argument that global governance is, if not ideal, at least a marked improvement over previous historical episodes and close to what can be realistically expected of it (Drezner 2014). Our own contribution to this literature argued that the past successes of multilateral cooperation were indeed very significant and generated a deeper level of interdependence; but we went on from here to argue that this higher level of interdependence now makes current and future cooperation more difficult.
Global cooperation, we contended, is gridlocked across a range of issue areas. The reasons for this are not the result of any single underlying causal structure, but rather of several underlying dynamics that work together. In order to understand why gridlock has come about it is important to understand how it was that the post–World War II era facilitated, in many respects, a successful form of “governed globalization” that contributed to relative peace and prosperity in large parts of the world over several decades. This period was marked by peace between the great powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be regarded as an unprecedented period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onwards. Although it is by no means the sole cause, the United Nations (UN) is central to this story, helping to create conditions under which decolonization and successive waves of democratization could take root, profoundly altering world politics. The Bretton Woods institutions created in the wake of World War II were the economic counterparts to the UN – providing a forum for economic cooperation heretofore unseen and mechanisms for economic development. The leading role of the United States in the creation and maintenance of these institutions, and the associated geopolitical and distributional implications, are of course a central piece of this story (Ikenberry 2001), though postwar global governance became much more than an epiphenomenon of US power (Keohane 1984).
The record of postwar multilateral organizations is, of course, mixed. Nonetheless, while the economic performance of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly across significant parts of the world. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the late 1990s countries such as China, India and South Africa had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day, though some countries, notably China, are beginning to shift to a slower, less export-oriented growth model.
Meanwhile, the institutionalization of international cooperation proceeded at an equally impressive pace (figure 1.1). There was substantial growth in the number of international treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal. At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal intergovernmental bodies, including a variety of types of transnational governance arrangements such as networks of government officials, public–private partnerships, as well as exclusively private governance bodies (see Hale and Held 2011).
All these postwar institutions helped create socio-economic conditions, according to the gridlock thesis, under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming multinational companies, investing abroad, developing global production chains, forming transnational advocacy networks, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. These conditions, along with technological innovation and the expansionary logic of capitalism, changed the nature of the world economy, radically increasing dependence on people and countries from every corner of the world. This interdependence, in turn, created demand for further coordination, which states and non-state actors, seeking the benefits of cooperation, provided by creating new and stronger institutions, beginning the cycle anew.
This is not to say that international institutions were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of the world economy, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are obviously critical drivers of interdependence. However, all of these changes were allowed to thrive and develop because they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. By preventing World War III and another Great Depression, the multilateral order arguably did just as much for interdependence as microprocessors or email (see Mueller 1990; O'Neal and Russett 1997).
This “self-reinforcing interdependence,” as we defined it in Gridlock, has now progressed to the point where it has altered our ability to engage in further global cooperation. That is, economic and political shifts in large part attributable to the successes of the postwar multilateral order are now among the factors grinding that system into gridlock. Because of the remarkable achievements of global cooperation in the postwar order, human interconnectedness weighs much more heavily on politics than it did in 1945. The need for international cooperation has never been higher. Yet the “supply” side of the equation, institutionalized multilateral cooperation, has stalled in many critical areas. In areas such as nuclear proliferation, the explosion of small arms sales, terrorism, failed states, global economic imbalances, financial market instability, global poverty and inequality, biodiversity losses, water deficits, and climate change, multilateral and transnational cooperation is now increasingly in question. Gridlock is not unique to one issue domain, but appears to be becoming a general feature of global governance: it represents a basket of trends that is today making international cooperation more difficult, even as deepening globalization and interdependence mean that we need global cooperation now more than ever. Put simply, cooperation seems to be increasingly difficult and deficient at precisely the time when it is needed most.
Gridlock identified four specific trends that now make global governance more difficult: increasing multipolarity, more complex problems, institutional inertia, and growing fragmentation. Because these trends partially emerge from previous successes of the institutionalized world order, we characterize them as “second order” cooperation problems. Each can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms (see table 1.1). We explain each trend below.
Table 1.1 Gridlock trends and their mechanisms
Trends
Mechanisms
1. Growing multipolarity
Increased transaction costs
Exacerbated legitimacy dilemma
Divergence of interests between critical states
2. Harder problems
Extensity: scope of problems has increased
Intensity: problems penetrate more deeply into societies
3. Institutional inertia
Formal lock-in of decision-making authority
Entrenchment of dysfunctional cognitive and organizational focal points
4. Fragmentation
Increased transaction costs
Inefficient division of labour, redundancy
Excessive flexibility
Growing multipolarity
The absolute number of states has increased by 300 per cent in the last 70 years, meaning that the most basic transaction costs of global governance have grown. More importantly, the number of states that “matter” on a given issue – that is, the states without whose cooperation a global problem cannot be adequately addressed – has expanded by similar proportions. At Bretton Woods in 1945, the rules of the world economy could essentially be written by the United States with some consultation with the United Kingdom and other European allies. In the aftermath of the 2008–9 crisis, the Group of Twenty major economies (G20) has become the principal forum for global economic management, not because the established powers desired to be more inclusive, but because they could not solve the problem on their own. However, a consequence of this progress is now that many more countries, representing a diverse range of interests, must agree in order for global cooperation to occur. Against this background, it is seen as both less effective and less legitimate for a few large states to dictate policies that affect others. Broadening global decision-making beyond the traditional powers represents a positive evolution in the postwar order, but it can make agreement harder to reach.
Harder problems
As interdependence has deepened, the types and scope of problems around which countries must cooperate has expanded. Problems are now both more extensive, implicating a broader range of countries and individuals within countries, and more intensive, penetrating deep into domestic policy space and even the daily lives of individuals. Consider the example of trade. For much of the postwar era, trade negotiations focused on reducing tariff levels on manufactured products traded between industrialized countries. Now, however, negotiating a trade agreement requires also discussing a host of social, environmental, and cultural subjects – genetically modified organisms, intellectual property, health and environmental standards, biodiversity, labour standards – about which countries often disagree sharply. In the area of environmental change a similar set of considerations applies. To clean up industrial smog or address ozone depletion required fairly discrete actions from a small number of top polluters. By contrast, the threat of climate change and the efforts to mitigate it involve nearly all countries of the globe. Yet, the divergence of voices and interests within both the developed and developing worlds, along with the sheer complexity of the incentives needed to achieve a low carbon economy, have made a global deal extremely difficult to achieve (Falkner, Stephan and Vogler 2010; Victor 2011b).
Institutional inertia
The postwar order succeeded, in part, because it incentivized great power involvement in key institutions. From the United Nations Security Council, to the Bretton Woods institutions, to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, key pillars of the global order explicitly grant special privileges to the countries that were wealthy and powerful at the time of their creation. This hierarchy was necessary to secure the participation of the most important countries in global governance. Today, the gain from this trade-off has shrunk while the costs have grown. As power shifts from West to East, North to South, a broader range of participation is needed on nearly all global issues if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the same time, following decolonization, the end of the Cold War, and economic development, the idea that some countries should hold more rights and privileges than others is increasingly (and rightly) regarded as morally bankrupt. And yet, the architects of the postwar order did not, in most cases, design institutions that would organically adjust to fluctuations in national power. Instead, what we see is the existing constellation of interests entrenched within traditional organizational and cognitive structures.
Fragmentation
The institution-builders of the 1940s began with, essentially, a blank slate. But efforts to cooperate internationally today occur in a dense institutional ecosystem shaped by path dependency. The exponential rise in both multilateral and transnational organizations has created a more complex multi-level and multi-actor system of global governance. Within this dense web of institutions, mandates can conflict, policy interventions are frequently uncoordinated, and scarce resources are subject to increased competition. In this context, the proliferation of institutions can lead to dysfunctional fragmentation, reducing the ability of multilateral institutions to provide public goods. When funding and political will are scarce, countries need focal points to guide policy (Keohane and Martin 1995), which can help define the nature and form of cooperation. Yet, when international regimes overlap, these positive effects are weakened. Fragmented institutions, in turn, disaggregate resources and political will, while potentially increasing transaction costs like arranging meetings and coordinating policies and standards. At the same time, the proliferation of institutions allows actors to “forum shop” across them, increasing flexibility and weakening the ability of any single cooperative framework to compel convergence on a single policy goal.
In stressing four trends to gridlock we emphasized the manner in which contemporary global governance problems compound each other, although different pathways carry more significance in some domains than in others. The challenges now faced by the multilateral order are substantially different from those faced by the 1945 victors in the postwar settlement. They are second-order cooperation problems arising from previous phases of success in global coordination. While “first order” cooperation problems familiar to students of international relations of course continue to apply, the gridlock trends place additional barriers before problem solving and reform at the global level.
Gridlock Revisited
Gridlock attracted a healthy mix of praise and criticism in print, in seminars, and in conversations with readers. Some thought we overemphasized the role of multilateralism in the postwar period. As many observers noted, global governance was hardly smooth sailing between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others questioned our diagnosis that current global governance was failing by asking what the appropriate counterfactual should be. Contemporary multilateralism is certainly not meeting all our needs, but does that mean it is failing, or simply that political reality always falls short of our normative goals? What is the appropriate benchmark of success?
In addition, some critics of postwar global governance, particularly in the global South, pointed out that gridlock has been beneficial for preventing certain strategies by leading states, and the United States in particular, for steering world affairs to their benefit. In this context, gridlock opens new possibilities for southern-led interventions in world politics, such as the New Development Bank led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the so-called BRICS. These discussions highlighted the importance of the distributional implications of global governance. Who wins and who loses from different kinds of international cooperation? What one country may see as gridlock, another may see as liberation.
Another set of criticisms questioned the causal mechanisms of the argument. In a number of domains observers noted the importance of traditional geopolitical rivalries in impeding cooperation, “first order” cooperation problems that we under-emphasized. Some also questioned the relative emphasis we placed on the different causal mechanisms within our argument, with some seeing multipolarity as more important than the others. We were also criticized for paying insufficient attention to the nature of contemporary global capitalism as a core explanation for global governance outcomes, the argument being that weak outcomes in global governance are in fact the expression of elite interests.
In our view these criticisms usefully identify scope conditions that help qualify our argument, but do not challenge the core analytic insight that deepening interdependence, growing from cooperation in the postwar period, set in motion key trends that now create obstacles to further cooperation even as the functional need for global governance grows. Instead, in our own reflections on the argument, what gave us most pause was how gridlock seemed to manifest more acutely in some issue areas than in others. While we saw gridlock as the dominant tendency, it struck us that some issue areas and institutional settings seemed more beset by it than others, as the chapters that follow explicate. We attempted to address this issue in the final chapter of Gridlock in the context of assessing various ways in which states and other actors might overcome the trends we identified in the book, but this was the most speculative section of the book.
Looking beyond Gridlock: Anomalies and Exceptions
Since Gridlock was published, we have been increasingly interested in exploring the anomalies and exceptions to our somewhat grim diagnosis of contemporary multilateralism. Are the anomalies sufficiently significant to undo the gridlock logic? Is global governance more adaptive and resilient than we previously believed? How does rising nationalism in various countries affect these issues? Answering these questions is critical not only to enhance our understanding of world politics, but also, crucially, to help think through practical solutions to the very real dilemmas of managing interdependence in the twenty-first century.
In thinking about responses to these issues, we invited a number of subject experts2 to explore the applicability – or not – of the gridlock thesis to various domains in a three-day workshop held at University College, Durham University, in June 2015 and a follow-up workshop at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, in March 2016. From the outset, we sought to include in the discussions a wide number of policy areas in world politics, from economics to security to the environment, in order to ensure a comprehensive test of the gridlock argument. Both workshops examined how, in each field, past and current governance may be understood as effective or successful; how, and in what ways, it has failed or succeeded; and what challenges are likely to characterize future governance. They also involved a critical discussion concerning if, and how, the trends of gridlock (see table 1.1) manifest in each area; and if they are absent, what else could explain (in)effectiveness in that sector. Finally, participants were invited to think about the implications of their analysis for institutions, states, and social groups.
Several conclusions emerged from these discussions. In most policy domains, it was widely recognized that global governance is manifestly inadequate for the needs of human societies in the globalized, interdependent, multipolar twenty-first century. The four “second order” gridlock trends – multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and fragmentation – were, as previously noted, identified as significant impediments to more effective governance. While there is no single appropriate benchmark for “successful” global governance (see below), there was little disagreement that building more effective global governance in almost every area of world politics is an urgent task in these sectors with enormous implications for human welfare.
At the same time, participants identified significant variation in the effectiveness of global governance across sectors, as well as across institutions or regimes within sectors. Certain institutions, like the Berne Union, the system of transnational commercial arbitration, the Chemical Weapons Convention, or the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) were recognized as effective in some crucial respects. In short, while global governance as a whole is lacking, there are some positive exceptions to this rule that reform efforts might emulate and build upon.
Most importantly, the detailed discussion of concrete issue areas allowed participants to identify a range of instances in which gridlock has not prevented effective global governance from emerging. The authors distilled these into seven general “pathways” out of gridlock; that is, a set of causal mechanisms and processes that under certain conditions lead to improvements in global governance arrangements. These pathways form the analytic core of this book.
Before describing the individual pathways, it is important to be more specific about what we mean by moving “through” and “beyond” gridlock. These terms refer to positions along a continuum of change in the outcomes of interest. “Through” connotes incremental yet significant improvements. “Beyond,” in turn, refers to a more fundamental transformation. While we expect moves through gridlock to be, on average, shorter in term than moves beyond gridlock, we do not assume a single temporal relation between the two. Various incremental steps may cascade into more profound transformations; alternatively, critical junctures or “punctuated equilibria” may provoke large realignments with great speed.
We are ultimately interested in how global governance can become more robust and effective vis-à-vis the transborder policy challenges it seeks to address. Analytically, it is useful to separate this object of analysis into two sets of outcomes.
First, we are concerned with the institutions and processes of global governance. Do we see more cooperation and compliance, new, or newly effective, institutions, or simply stagnation? Here we are particularly interested in explaining the creation, use, and effectiveness of transborder institutions and the patterns of state and non-state behaviour that play out around them. Are rules created that stand a reasonable chance of shaping behaviour? Do institutions emerge that provide collective benefits? Are existing institutions reformed to become more efficacious? An example of moving “through” gridlock in this sense might be, say, effective coordination in the UN Security Council on humanitarian crises. Moving “beyond” gridlock in this setting, in turn, could refer to a deeper shift such as a fundamental reform of the Security Council's voting rules to reduce the power of veto-holders.
Second, we are concerned with the impact of global governance on human welfare. Does more cooperation lead to better outcomes? If new or stronger intergovernmental or transnational institutions emerge, do they have a significant and positive impact on the problems they seek to address? Or is their impact negligible? Continuing with the above example, a pathway “through” gridlock in this realm would be Security Council authorization of effective peacekeeping missions capable of maintaining a fragile order, while “beyond” would require a model of authorized intervention which was reliable and effective enough to, for example, drastically reduce the number of people killed in civil wars each year.
Regarding this second set of impact-oriented outcomes, it is of course essential to ask for whom the impact of global governance is positive or negative. In the abstract, we may wish to define effectiveness in general terms of public good provision. Do global governance arrangements in a given issue area meet the functional needs created by interdependence or not? For many issues, of course, the impact of global governance creates both winners and losers. Shifts in global governance may both help to resolve the functional dilemmas of interdependence while also disadvantaging or privileging specific actors or groups. Teasing out these differentiated impacts is crucial to the analysis presented here.
In the chapters that follow, then, we understand pathways through and/or beyond gridlock as causal processes that (a) improve the institutions and processes of global governance and/or (b) improve the impact of global governance on human welfare broadly, with particular attention to the range of potential positive and negative impacts that may apply to different groups.
To address these issues satisfactorily requires of course a meaningful counterfactual. Does the process or impact of global governance improve compared to what? Because there is no single appropriate counterfactual, the chapters that follow evaluate the outcomes of interest against several different benchmarks, triangulating among them as appropriate. First, they consider the process and impact of global governance in an issue area compared to previous time periods. For example, is the global trade regime more or less effective after the creation of the WTO? Second, they consider actual outcomes against alternative proposals that have been made or attempted by various actors in a given issue domain. In investment, for example, some countries have proposed replacing the current bilateral system with a multilateral treaty, such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment that was actively negotiated in the 1990s. Third, the chapters compare outcomes against the null scenario – what if nothing had been done? While reasonable readers may disagree with the specification of some of the counterfactuals employed in the chapters below, we seek to make our evaluations and arguments as transparent as possible by being explicit about our assumptions and points of comparison. It seems to us that such an approach is unavoidable. Implicitly or explicitly, all evaluations of current effectiveness or prospects for future effectiveness entail some counterfactual analysis; the point is to be clear about it.
Pathways through and beyond Gridlock
Each chapter in this book will explore how one or more of the seven core pathways through which gridlock may be overcome relates to a distinct issue area in global governance. We use these pathways both retrospectively, to explain a certain positive outcome, and prospectively, to evaluate the likelihood of reaching a particular outcome. Before setting out the substance of the chapters that follow, it is important to be clear about the analytical core of each of the pathways, their relationship to each other, as well as what we mean by “pathways” in the first place. The pathways are described below and summarized in table 1.2.
Table 1.2 Pathways through and beyond gridlock and their mechanisms
Pathways
Mechanisms
1. Shifts in major powers' core interests
Gridlock can provoke or exacerbate systemic or regional crises creating incentives for major powers to provide global public goods
2. Autonomous and adaptive international institutions
The accrual of authority in some international institutions has made them increasingly autonomous from the interests of their members
Some international organizations possess generative rule-making capacity to adapt to new circumstances
3. Technical groups with effective and legitimate processes
Issue area in which states delegate to experts are relatively insulated from gridlock trends
Transparent and rational procedures add legitimacy to technocratic decision-making
4. Multiple, diverse organizations and institutions coalesce around common goals/norms.
Possible for “additive” or “expansionary” contexts, not “absolute” issue areas
Diffusion and entrenchment of common principles, norms, and goals across a policy domain
5. Mobilization of domestic constituencies for cooperation and compliance
Socializing communities of actors in particular practices and norms
Institutional channels give leverage to domestic and regional actors
6. Civil society coalitions with reformist states
Coalitions across state–civil society boundaries generate new political possibilities
Do not challenge the core interests of key states
7. Innovative leadership as a reaction to gridlock
Gridlock provokes innovative and entrepreneurial strategies (e.g. norm entrepreneurship).
Each pathway describes a constellation of conditions and causal mechanisms that apply across various domains. The pathways emphasize general factors like the preferences of states and other actors, the material and ideational processes that generate these preferences, the strategies actors employ, the institutional arrangements in which they operate, and power relations between them. Because we are interested in exploring tangible ways to advance effective global governance, the pathways emphasize relatively proximate and immediate dynamics, as opposed to more remote, structural, and long-term trends (see below).
1 Shifts in major powers' core interests
It is a core tenet of international relations theory that when one or more great powers have a strong national interest in policies that create a global public good, they will be willing and often able to provide that public good. Hard versions of Realist theory see this condition as the only setting in which global public goods are likely to be provided, and it has been advanced as a prominent explanation for the postwar global order (Gilpin 1981). A central argument of Gridlock is that this mechanism has been decreasingly common in more recent decades, as growing multipolarity (1) increases the number of great powers that are required to act to provide a global public good in many issue domains; (2) increases the heterogeneity of interests among the great powers because states with very different political and economic systems weigh more heavily on world politics. Both of these effects make it less likely for a sufficient coalition of major powers to come together to provide a public good. For example, preventing global financial contagion requires a much larger coalition of countries to act than in, say, the 1970s and those countries' preferences are shaped by very different domestic political economies.
