Beginning in fall 2008, the CIPS will hold a series of workshops on the changing nature of global governance. The workshops will provide University of Ottawa scholars of global governance with a structured forum to share their insights and their works-in-progress, and to explore opportunities for new projects and partnerships. Leading scholars from around the world will also be invited to participate and present their work in the workshops, thereby reinforcing intellectual and professional networks, and establishing the University as a centre for global governance research.
One of the defining features of the last two decades has been the rapid globalization of commerce, investment, production, technology, communities, criminal networks, pollution, and infectious diseases. These changes have given rise to a growing array of transnational problems that cannot be resolved by individual states acting alone. However, many of today’s major international organizations were created during a different era – immediately after World War II – and they are now struggling to adjust to these challenges of globalization and to the rise of powerful new actors, from the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to nongovernmental actors including major corporations and advocacy groups.
According to some observers, there is a growing gap between the need for, and the supply of, transnational cooperation to respond to the mounting challenges of globalization – a gap that has resulted in a so-called “crisis of global governance.” But other observers point to a diverse array of global governance structures which has emerged in recent years, and which is partly filling this gap. Many of these new structures bear little resemblance to the formal international organizations created after World War II: they are tremendously varied in organizational form and membership, they include different combinations of public and private actors, and they often operate at multiple “scales” simultaneously – from the global to the local.
The workshops will investigate the extent, character, significance, and implications of the changing structures and practices of global governance. Each workshop will feature research by a different scholar or group of scholars. Some will focus on particular policy domains (e.g., global environmental governance) while others will address issues cutting across several policy domains (e.g., the sources of “legitimacy” in global governance). To facilitate structured and cumulative discussion from one workshop to the next, each presenter will be asked to address the following question: What does your research reveal about the extent and nature of change taking place in global governance? More specifically, we will investigate such change along the following three dimensions:
If these changes are as extensive as many claim, then they have a number of important implications. Participants in the workshop series are particularly interested in three such implications, specifically around questions of power, legitimacy and effectiveness: