Marketized Global Governance

This review of contemporary world governance would be incomplete if it only covered official agencies at substate, state, and suprastate levels. Not all rules in the globalizing world of the late twentieth century emanate from the public sector. Markets, too, have played an important role in global regulation, often stepping in where states and global governance agencies have left gaps.

The construction and implementation of rules by private-sector bodies has perhaps gone furthest. In respect of the global financial markets, where very little effective official governance has been developed. With regard to global stock markets, for example, codes of conduct have emanated mainly from the International Federation of Stock Exchanges (founded in 196l), the international Securities Market Association (1969), and the semi­official International Organization of Securities Commissions (1984). Meanwhile debt security rating agencies such as Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's have effectively filled a regula­tory role in the global credit markets (Sinclair 1994). In addition, commercial banks have taken considerable initiative alongside official agencies like the IMF in managing (some would say mis­managing) the recurrent financial crises of debt-ridden countries since 1982.

Global policy initiatives by the private sector have ranged well beyond the financial markets, too. For example, the World Economic Forum founded in 1971, now unites some 900 major companies under the motto of 'entrepreneurship in the global public interest'. Amongst its many initiatives, the Forum has undertaken conciliation attempts in sev­eral major interstate conflicts, including the Arab-Israeli dispute. The WEF was also instrumen­tal in launching the Uruguay Round of world trade negotiations that resulted in the creation of the WTO. Scores of private endowments have also become active in global policy-making. Two promi­nent examples are the Ford Foundation (which has been especially influential in the field of develop­ment aid since the 1960s) and the Soros Foundations (which have been major promoters of liberalization in the former Soviet bloc). Set up in 1991, a World Business Council for Sustainable Development has injected a corporate input into global environmental management. There have even been proposals to create a permanent 'cham­ber of companies' in the United Nations alongside the General Assembly of states. Even if this sugges­tion were not adopted—as seems likely—it is clear that global governance is not an affair of the public sector alone.

Global Social Movements

"Market institutions are not the only actors outside the public sector that contribute to governance in the contemporary globalizing world. Much initiat­ive also emanates from a non-official, non-profit 'third sector' of global social movements. Here pop­ular concern and protest are mobilized in cam­paigns to reshape policies and the deeper structures of social relations (like militarism or capitalism, for example) that those policies reflect. The associa­tions are global both insofar as they address whole-world problems and in the sense that they pursue their causes by exploiting the circumstances of globalization (air travel, computer networks, global laws, and so on). As noted earlier, precursors of today's transborder social movements date back to the nineteenth century; however, contemporary activities involve far larger numbers of people, greater institutional resources, and bigger impacts Global social movements show enormous diversity. For one thing, they address an extremely wide spectrum of issues, from aboriginal rights to HIV/AIDS. They also hold extremely divergent -visions of the transformed world that they wish to create, drawing inspiration variously from anar­chism, neo-fascism, a host of traditional and new religions, and much else. Some of the movements are global in the sense that they work through world­wide networks, like Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). In contrast, others 'think globally and act locally', that is, they hold a global orientation while operating at a grassroots level. Some groups campaign in isolation, while others pursue their aims through large coalitions. Illustrating the latter approach, the Pesticides Action Network encompasses some 350 groups in over fifty countries. Social movement activity includes both sporadic amateur improvisations (such as many stu­dent protests) and long-term professionalized and institutionalized programmes (of the kind sustained by Greenpeace and Christian Aid). Finally, global social movements embrace a Variety of strategies. Some activists see fit to work with governments, global governance agencies, and business associa­tions, while others regard any collaboration with the establishment' as an unacceptable compromise of their principles.

Although global social movements often suffer from shortages of resources and divisive internal disputes, they can exert considerable influence in contemporary world governance. Amongst other things, these forces have contributed substantially to policy innovation in areas such as ecological sus­tainability, human rights protection, disaster relief, welfare provision, and community improvement. By 1990 most of the major global governance agencies had set up offices tor liaison with what they generally call non-governmental organizations, or 'NGOs' (see Ch. 15). Many social-movement asso­ciations have played important roles both in advis­ing the official institutions and in helping to implement their policies. Indeed, bodies like the World Bank and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have sometimes become quite dependent on NGO assistance.

Box 1.4. HIV/AIDS: A Case Study in Global Governance Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was first identified in 1981. In a globalizing era, when several hundred million passengers take transborder flights each year, the number of recorded cases of AIDS grew to 150,000 worldwide in 1988 and over 400,000 by the end of 1991. Over the same period a further 8-10 million people contracted HIV, the virus believed to cause the disease, so that, in the absence of curative therapies, millions more AIDS cases are in prospect. HIV/AIDS has attracted global attention as no pre­vious transborder epidemic. The plight quickly became the focus of global panic, global conferences, global support groups, global policies, and global commemoration with an annual World AIDS Day on 1 December. It was soon recognized that, in the words of a former Prime Minister of France, 'AIDS will be con­quered everywhere or it will not be conquered at all'. The global campaign against AIDS has involved a very wide range of governance agencies. For their part, states have activated their public health systems, both individually and through regular intergovern­mental consultations. At the same time, suprastate bodies have taken initiatives such as the AIDS Task Force of the European Union and the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization. Some global companies like Benetton have sponsored public service advertising to combat the spread of the disease. The International Red Cross and other nonprofit associations involved in patient care have maintained regular transboundary com­munication and co-ordination. At the grassroots, afflicted individuals have formed a Global Network of People Living with HIV and AIDS. No such multifaceted attempt at extensive global regulation met, say, the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19, let alone the intercontinental bubonic plague of the fourteenth century.

Thousands of civic groups have attended the vari­ous UN-sponsored global issue conferences held since the 1970s, where they have lobbied officials and influenced the resultant programmes of action. Such scenarios provide an illustration of a new pol­itics that has been emerging in the last decades of the twentieth century, whereby social movements channel many of their efforts to reshape national and local government policies through suprastate regulatory agencies.

In this and other ways, many activists in global social movements have aimed—and to some extent succeeded—not only to change policies, but also to reconstruct the very nature of politics. Their initia­tives have frequently challenged prevailing con­cepts, procedures, and tactics of political action. For example, a number of these associations have adopted nonhierarchical modes of decision-taking, and in general they have included women to a greater extent than is found in official and com­mercial channels. As a result of global social move­ments, popular participation in world politics has become far more direct and extensive than in Westphalian days, when citizen involvement tended to mean no more than a vote in national elections to determine which political party would conduct the state's foreign policy.