Global Governance in Practice
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12529 |
| Author | Vincent Pouliot,Jean‐Philippe Thérien |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
Global Governance in Practice
Vincent Pouliot
McGill University
Jean-Philippe Th
erien
Universit
e de Montr
eal
Abstract
We argue that a focus on practices can enrich the study of global governance by drawing attention to a wealth of informal
processes and their politics. After explaining the usefulness of a practice approach, we examine four pervasive practices in
contemporary world politics: hosting a global conference, accrediting NGOs, mandating a group of experts, and forming multi-
stakeholder partnerships. For each of these established ‘ways of doing things,’we provide a definition, decline its variations,
and analyze its politics. Through our case studies, we show that global governance practices often generate competing social
effects, by which inclusionary trends combine with more exclusionary tendencies. This common dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion provides an analytical key to better understand the politics of global public policy making, including its power
dynamics.
Policy Implications
•Global governance is structured by a set of established practices that fill the gaps between written rules.
•Global actors should pay more attention to the fact that new practices often generate a combination of inclusionary and
exclusionary effects.
•As they broaden the scope of participation, global conference hosts should be careful not to draw new divisions with
those actors that stay on the outside.
•As international organizations accredit NGOs in order to bolster their voice on the international stage, they should ensure
that in so doing they do not reinforce existing inequalities and political cleavages.
•When mandating a group of experts, global decision-makers should consider that such an opening up of the policy pro-
cess tends to increase the influence of technocratic elites and to marginalize certain viewpoints.
•In forming multistakeholder partnerships, the goal of harnessing the resources of a variety of actors should be balanced
against the danger of nurturing dynamics of cooptation and normative homogeneity.
Imagine, for the sake of the thought experiment, that a
transnational team of physicists and engineers came to
invent a functioning teleportation device. For minimal costs,
people and goods alike could be moved instantly from one
corner of the globe to the other. We can easily envision
how such a revolutionary discovery would impact global
governance. As capital funds and cutting edge startups rush
to invest and take control of the technology, a group of
leading nations would confer, in an informal summit, to
coordinate their position. The United Nations (UN) would
soon hold a special session of the General Assembly on the
matter, setting up a panel of international experts to come
up with analysis and policy recommendations. Non-state
actors would no doubt get involved too. Multinational cor-
porations would form a network to lobby for friendly
domestic regulations and ask the World Trade Organization
for the continuation of free trade, while coalitions of human
rights and development NGOs would call for the worldwide
diffusion of the technology. Upon reading the experts
report, the UN Secretary-General would convene a large
‘multistakeholder’conference in one of the world’s global
cities, where states would adopt, under the scrutiny of inter-
national media, global activists, and private corporations, a
hard-fought and partly hollow declaration. The UN General
Assembly would later establish a dedicated working group,
which would take two more years to negotiate an Interna-
tional Convention on Teleportation. Once adopted, this con-
vention would give rise to repeated conflicts in which
governments of North and South, teleportation companies,
and civil society organizations would disagree on how the
new global regime should operate.
As far-fetched as the teleportation example may sound,
our description of how new global problems are addressed
is much more realistic. The social infrastructure of global
governance, which is relatively stable and predictable, is
comprised of typical practices, that is, socially organized and
meaningful patterns of activities that tend to recur over
time. In other words, global governance is made of well-
established ways of doing things, which serve as the plat-
form for politics beyond the state. Compared to rules, such
Global Policy (2018) 9:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12529 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 9 . Issue 2 . May 2018 163
Research Article
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