Introduction
Until recently, the majority of political scientists used to refer to the process of Globalisation as such that was bound to gain ever faster momentum as time goes on. This, in turn, explains the popularity of the concept “global governance” through the 1990s and the 21st century’s first decade. After all, throughout the historical period in question, global governance was seen as the most natural/logical instrument of facilitating Globalisation on a worldwide scale.
Nevertheless, the rapid deterioration of international law, which has been defining the political realities in the world since 2014, resulted in undermining the term’s validity to an extent. Subsequently, there has been a substantial increase of definitions as to what the notion of global governance stands for. Moreover, it now accounts for a common practice among politicians and political scientists to claim that the concerned notion is misleading.
Therefore, there is nothing incidental about the fact that, as of today, evaluating the effectiveness of global governance’s practical implementation on both international and regional levels is widely regarded as a rather challenging undertaking. This simply could not be otherwise: the abundance of theoretical premises behind the concept of global governance naturally legitimises even the most obscure interpretations of the term’s practical significance.
Nevertheless, the author believes that it is still possible to gain a better understating of global governance, as a tangible tool for making this world a better place. This objective can be achieved by mean of subjecting it to an analytical inquiry and interpreting the possible implications of the would-be acquired insights into the subject matter in question. While conducting research, the author expects to find evidence as to the fact that nowadays, the term “global governance” is being primarily evoked for rhetorical purposes and that the concept’s practical deployment is bound to suffer from the lack of efficiency. At the same time, however, the author anticipates discovering the objective indications of the concept’s high value as a “thing in itself”.
Literature Review
Global Governance
As it was implied earlier, there is a good reason to assume that the emergence of the “global governance” concept has been objectively predetermined by the very logic of historical progress. Even though it was specifically through the late 1990s and early 2000s that the concerned concept became deeply embedded into the paradigm of international relations (IR) as we know it today, its origins can be traced back to the formation of the League of Nations in 1920. This particular development was reflective of people’s growing awareness of the fact that, in order to be able to prevent the outbreak of yet another world war, humanity must institutionalise some kind of a transnational legislative body, in charge of exercising certain control over the fluctuating dynamics in the field of IR (MacQueen 2018).
However, the League of Nations has failed rather miserably, in this regard: the year 1939 marked the beginning of the WW2. After the defeat of the Axis powers at the hands of the Allies, the League of Nations was disbanded (1946) and sub-sequentially reorganised (1948) in what today is known as the Organization of United Nations (UN), with the US, USSR (Russia), France, UK, and China having been declared its Security Council’s permanent members.
Throughout the Cold War, the UN’s foremost priority was encouraging more and more countries throughout the world to be willing to adhere to the basic provisions of international law while addressing various challenges. After all, even today there is no effective mechanism in existence for enforcing these provisions on a global scale. The organisation’s another important function was to serve as a mediator between the US and USSR, within the context of how both superpowers used to go about settling different geopolitical disputes between them.
Comparing to what it used to be the case with the League of Nations, the UN has proven to be much more effective as the instrument of global governance. The UN did succeed in preventing the escalation of tensions between these two countries into a full-scale war on at least a few occasions, such as during the so-called Caribbean Crisis of 1962.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the collective West has found itself in the position to exercise unilateral control over the socio-political developments in the world. This, in turn, was seen calling for the establishment of the US-led “new world order”, in which America was to adopt the role of supreme arbiter in the domain of international relations while enjoying the title of the world’s only “superpower”.
As a result, throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, the authoritative power of the UN (as the actual agent of global governance) has weakened rather considerably. The validity of this suggestion is best illustrated, regarding the fact that during the historical period in question, the rate of geopolitical volatility in the world has increased to an unprecedented height. As Call (2016) noted, “After declining by one-third since 1991, the number of armed conflicts in the world increased by 25 percent from 2012 to 2014.
Wars have also become more deadly” (p. 194). The continual deterioration of international law since the early 1990s is commonly referred to as having been the actual reason. Many political analysts believe that this process has been triggered by the US-led military attacks of Yugoslavia (1992), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011), which were not authorized by the UN and which resulted in the destruction of these countries’ factual statehood.
The most notable feature of global governance, as the instrument of facilitating the Western-centric “new world order”, has been its deep affiliation with the ideology of neoliberalism, which calls for the abandonment of the very idea of a welfare-state as something fundamentally inconsistent with the notion of economic self-sustainability. The ideology’s main assumption is that the lesser is the government’s role in managing the economy/public sphere, the better.
This explains why the functioning of various international institutions (such as IMF, WTO, World Bank, etc.), as an integral part of the global governance process, has been traditionally concerned with the promotion and “soft power” enforcement of economic liberalisation throughout the world (Malone 2016). Nowadays, both activities are commonly regarded to represent the building blocks of “Liberal peace”: the term that refers to the realities of post-industrial modernity. There, however, has always been a strongly defined coercive quality to how the Western-based neoliberal practitioners of global governance used to go about promoting their agenda, in this regard.
As Duffield (2014) argued, “Liberal peace is a system of carrots and sticks where cooperation paves the way for development assistance and access to the wider networks of global governance, while non-cooperation risks varying degrees of conditionality and isolation” (p. 34). The manner in which the IMF indulges in global governance is perfectly illustrative of how this is being done in practice. If a particular “third word” country in need of financial assistance refuses to implement the suggested (by IMF officials) neoliberal economic reforms, as the main prerequisite to qualify for the monetary loan from the IMF, it is most likely to be left without any assistance, whatsoever (Haslam 2005).
Because the adoption of neoliberal reforms results in the drastic reduction of the governmentally sponsored social programs, as well as in the rapid widening of the gap between the rich and poor, it is explainable why there often appears to be very little factual beneficence to the assumed benefits of global governance: at least as perceived by the affected individuals on a regional level. As Martin (2000) observed, “The IMF programs imposed on African countries have, in fact, led to… the further erosion of the state’s administrative capacity, and the privatization and criminalization of public authority, government services, public administration” (p. 178).
To complicate the matter even further, during the last decade the geopolitical power of the collective West, in general, and the US, in particular, has weakened to an unprecedented extent: something that raises much doubt about the West’s ability to exercise “neoliberal” global governance, in the first place (Schenoni & Mainwaring 2019). The full soundness of this suggestion is best explored, with respect to America’s most recent failures with pursuing the “regime change” policy in Syria, Venezuela and Iran, as well as the country’s apparent inability to find the effective approach to confronting Russia and China.
It is understood, of course, that this could not result in anything else but in undermining the conceptual legitimacy of the term “global governance” and the corresponding practices even further. One of the indications that this has indeed been the case can serve the earlier mentioned increase of the alternative definitions of global governance that has taken place through the recent decade (Moon 2019). However, it is still possible to identify the two distinctive approaches to describing the notion, adopted by the majority of IR theorists in the West.
The first of these approaches can be generally described as Realist. It is concerned with endorsing the idea that, even though there is a strong collaborative quality to the global governance-related practices, the latter still presuppose the vertical (hierarchical) essence of the governing process. For example, according to Galaz et al. (2017), “By global governance we refer to attempts for steering social processes at the international level through international institutional development including norms and international law” (p. 6). The second methodological approach to understanding what global governance is all about appears to adhere to the Constructivist view on the significance of IR.
Just as the neoliberal politicians believe in the self-sustainability of the capitalist economy, supposedly controlled by the “invisible hand of the market”, the advocates of this view suggest that, within the context of how global governance is being implemented on the locale, there is no actual “governor” to speak of. As Pattberg and Widerberg (2015) pointed out to, “The structure, or architecture, of today’s global governance is, in fact, unstructured. It is not organised around a coherent set of rules… The architecture is instead constituted by a myriad of international and transnational institutions that interact and overlap” (p. 693).
This idea, in turn, derives from the Constructivist assumption that being rational agents, state actors are thoroughly capable of understanding the benefits of addressing the socio-economic, humanitarian, and environmental issues in close collaboration with each other.
The above-stated may seem to imply that the notion of global governance is much too speculative to be deemed capable of helping humanity to remain on the path of progress. At the same time, however, there can be very little doubt about the tangible realness of various international organisations that embody the concept, such as the earlier mentioned IMF. Moreover, there is also plenty of evidence as to the full workability of the non-hierarchical model of global governance.
After all, it represents a well-established fact that ever since the early 2000s, the so-called “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) have participated heavily in forming the geopolitical climate on this planet (Leonard 2015). To exemplify the validity of this suggestion, one can refer to what were the actual mechanics of triggering the most recent “democratic” revolutions in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Ukraine.
One of the most obvious implications of what has been said earlier is that when it comes to researching the effectiveness of how global governance is being put to work on a regional level, one must be willing to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to doing it. The reason for this is apparent: the functioning and the current positioning of NGOs/transnational corporations, as the factual agents of international relations, is not fully consistent with the basic provisions of the conventional paradigm of international relations. Another possible implication, in this regard, is that it will be the most appropriate to access the practice’s effectiveness in conjunction with the Realist model of IR, as such that presupposes the existence of objective assessment-criteria for addressing the task. Finally, it will only be logical to refer to the “vertical” and “horizontal” models of global governance as being mutually complementary.
Structures of Global Governance
As it was argued earlier, there continues to remain much ambiguity to how political analysts define global governance, its functions, and its structural subtleties. Nevertheless, most of these individuals agree that, as of today, it is specifically the UN and its numerous subsidiaries/affiliates that deserve the most to be regarded as the globally scaled governing bodies (Kacowicz 2018). After having been established in 1948, the organisation has declared its operational objectives to be as follows: to act as the facilitator of peace and stability in the world, to help state actors solving their disputes, and to apply a continual effort in preventing/addressing humanitarian crises.
The system of global governance, represented by the UN, does not aspire to undermine the national sovereignty of independent countries unless an acute threat to world security is in question. The UN’s main legislative body is the General Assembly, which is an annual meeting of delegations that represent the organisation’s members. Each delegation consists of no more than 5 representatives and 5 deputies. After having adopted the agenda, delegations to the General Assembly initiate a general discussion that lasts for two or three weeks and charters the matters of concern for the organisation’s seven General Committees (Adhikari 2019).
A special Political Committee addresses the political and international security issues, the First Committee oversees the implementation of the UN’s disarmament initiatives, the Second Committee deals with economic and financial matters, the Third Committee concerns itself with finding solutions to various social and humanitarian problems, the Fourth Committee addresses post-colonial issues in the underdeveloped parts of the world, and the Sixth Committee seeks to identify and properly address the legal aspects of the organisation’s functioning, as well as to enforce the fulfilment of political and economic agreements between the UN members.
In addition, there are a number of the UN-sponsored commissions and committees that specialise in handling the narrower issues of international concern, such as the ones related to space exploration, the use of nuclear energy, the preservation of the natural environment, etc. (MacKenzie 2015).
As of today, UN membership accounts for 193 countries. These countries continue to be referred to as the only legitimate actors in the arena of international relations: in full accordance with the Westphalian principle of sovereignty. Except for the earlier mentioned five permanent Security Council’s members, every country has the right to be elected as one of the Council’s ten non-permanent members on a biennial (once in every two years) basis.
The Security Council’s foremost priority is to act as the guardian of peace on a worldwide scale. It is considered to be the most powerful body within the UN’s structure: despite the fact that during the last decade the Security Council has sustained numerous setbacks while striving to maintain geopolitical stability in the world. The resolutions of the Security Council’s pass if at least nine out of the fifteen Council’s members vote for them. The Council’s permanent members have the right to veto the passing of those resolutions that they do not approve (Frederking & Patane 2017).
The organisation’s another important subdivision is the International Criminal Court, consisting of fifteen judges from different countries (elected during the General Assembly). The Court’s mission is to ensure that the UN members comply with the provisions of international law (Ayeni & Olong 2017). An integral part of the UN structure are the intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) for addressing the issues of global concern in the specific fields of humanity’s activity, such as UNESCO or IAEA. Even though the resolutions of IGOs are considered mandatory, there is no effective mechanism for enforcing their implementation locally (Mukerji 2017).
Although the UN continues to be deemed as the only fully legitimate agent of global governance, the earlier mentioned NGOs appear to take an ever-active part in shaping the process’s procedural intricacies and defining its long-term outcomes. As Ferguson (2012) argued, “NGOs not only participate in global governance, but also have been substantially involved in its construction” (p. 383). As of 2017, the number of the officially registered NGOs throughout the world has reached staggering 3750 (Mitchell & Stroup 2017). Among the most influential of them can be named Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, ActionAid, Mercy Corps, etc.
According to their spokesmen, the enactment of the UN Charter’s Article 71 in 1948, which requires the organisation’s sub-divisional units to take into account the opinions of ordinary people, has predetermined the emergence of NGOs as the useful instruments of bettering the world. The common assumption, in this regard, is that the involvement of NGOs in global governance encourages individuals to take a firmer stance when it comes to defending their civil rights, which in turn is expected to contribute substantially towards ensuring their overall well-being (Kaloudis 2017). The rationale behind the trend is usually discussed in terms similar with that of Dany (2014), “Increased NGO participation is regarded as the best way to secure that civil society has a say in global governance next to states and business organizations.
The more NGOs participate, the better they seem to be able to influence the policy outcomes of international negotiation” (p. 419). Such a point of view resonates well with the Constructivist idea that the linear vector of social, cultural, and technological progress in the world changes the very essence of political dynamics in the world, in the sense of making them more rationally-driven and less chaotic (Syed & Ali 2018; Banerjee 2018).
Consequently, this presupposes the possibility for the NGO-based forms of global governance to be “horizontally” structured. A certain parallel can be drawn between the functioning of an ant-house and the manner in which NGOs pursue their formal organisational agenda. After all, there is a strong self-organising quality to both phenomena.
Once assessed from the Realist perspective, the governing function of NGOs will appear to be much different. While functioning on a transnational basis, these organisations serve to expand the boundaries of their host-countries’ “soft power” across the continents. That is, they act as the agents of foreign influence in the countries where they operate. Because the overwhelming majority of NGOs are Western-based, there is indeed much logic in perceiving them as yet another tool that the collective West resorts to while attempting to preserve its geopolitical dominance over the rest of the world (Kaldor 2012, p. 190).
According to Whittall (2015), “NGOs have in many cases become extensions of Western foreign policy… Humanitarian action is still tied to the unipolar chessboard where only the white pieces are wielding power” (p. 7). As some analysts view it, NGOs and other non-state actors can be thought of as such that embody the “negative” approach to extending the outreach of its soft power, adopted by the West. The reason for this is that, as of today, there is plenty of examples when the NGOs’ involvement in addressing the issues of global concern (such as the “lack of democracy” in the resource-rich developing countries) has resulted in making the situation much worse (Cruz 2015).
This, in turn, can be seen indicating the fact that being unable to improve living standards in their own countries, Western politicians deliberately strive to undermine these standards everywhere else in the world. In this way, the West will still be able to preserve its appeal as the island of prosperity and stability amidst the surrounding geopolitical chaos (McClure 2015). Hence, the commonly acknowledged link between NGOs and the secret service agencies in the West. Because of it, there is a good rationale in assuming that the structures of non-state global governance are much more “vertical” than what it may seem to be the case to a naked eye.
Drivers of Conflict in the Fragile States
When it comes to discussing the drivers of conflict in fragile states, one can hardly avoid providing a definition as to what the notion of “failed statehood” actually denotes. In a nutshell, the concerned notion refers to the prolonged collapse of central state authority in the Third and Second world countries with the absence of any objective reasons to expect that this authority will eventually be restored (Logan & Preble 2008).
Today’s Libya and Somalia exemplify well what the term “failed state” stands for. Therefore, it will only be appropriate to assume that by evoking the notion of “fragile state”, political analysts refer to the country that is in the process of losing its sovereignty due to the deterioration of state institutions, when it is only a matter of time before it joins the list of “failed states” and becomes the legitimate subject of a humanitarian intervention. According to Vallings and Moreno-Torres (2005), “Fragility is understood here to refer to ineffective states, those that cannot or will not fulfil minimal functions of government. The term is used interchangeably with weakness and instability” (p. 6).
The roots of such a fragility have been assessed from several perspectives and many of the proposed explanations of the phenomenon do not appear to be very compatible. Nevertheless, most political observers agree that it is specifically the countries with the absence of any long-termed statehood traditions that are particularly vulnerable to the prospect of beginning to turn “fragile” (Newman & Aloyo 2015; Kolk & Lenfant 2015).
The process’s main drivers can be outlined as follows: economic underdevelopment, the lack/absence of natural resources, violent conflicts, transitional processes within the society, vulnerability to the external shocks, geographically unfavourable location, and the inefficacy of the deployed strategies (on the international community’s part) to addressing the erosion of statehood in every particular country (Vallings & Moreno-Torres 2005).
Haiti stands out as a good example, in this regard, as it meets just about every of the earlier outlined criteria to be defined as a fragile/failed state. According to the authors, the common driver of conflict in fragile states is the weakness of political institutions. Such their suggestion correlates well with the idea that the functional “fragility” of every particular country should be seen reflective of the fact that there are no historical, cultural, and economic preconditions for this country to be thought of as a truly sovereign geopolitical entity in the first place (Malejacq 2016).
What this means is that the incidents of statehood failure in the developing countries should be discussed in terms of a post-colonial issue. After all, the current national borders of most fragile/failed states are, in essence, the lines of demarcation between the colonial powers’ spheres of influence, drawn in the 19th century (Gilley 2018). Those who drew these lines were the least concerned with taking into account the cultural and economic specifics of the adjacent areas.
Thus, it will be appropriate to suggest that:
- The collective West is indirectly (and often directly) responsible for the statehood failure in many countries of the world. An effective strategy for mitigating the resulted consequences, such as the current refugee crisis in Europe, cannot be worked out without the Western countries’ willingness to actively contribute to the process.
- The most effective approach to helping “fragile” countries to gain resilience from the internal and external shocks is to invest in strengthening/rebuilding the social and political infrastructure on the locale. There is, however, a certain weakness to such an approach: the tangible benefits of its deployment can only be realised on a long-term basis.
Global Governance at Works
The Kimberley Process (KP)
Having been approved by the participating countries in 2002, the Kimberley Process represents a good example of the concept of global governance being put to work. In essence, the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), adopted under the auspices of the KP, requires the diamond-exporting signatories in Africa to provide a legally binding assurance that the diamonds they offer for sale on the international market do not come from the areas ravaged by a civil war and that the would-be generated revenues will not be used to finance any rebel-groups.
This, in turn, was expected to contribute towards ensuring the full legitimacy of the ongoing diamond trade in the world and reducing the intensity of violent conflicts in Africa. As Winetroub (2013) noted, “The KP was founded to protect the diamond trade from conflict-producing rebel groups that were seen as the primary threat to an exclusively conflict-free diamond market” (p. 1428). Having been approved by the World Diamond Council, the KPCS draws from the wishful assumption that the large commercial organisations are genuinely interested in making this world a better place, as something that has the value of its own.
Partially, this explains the largely non-mandatory operating principle of the agreement’s auditing mechanism, known as the KP’s System of Warranties: something best described in terms of “a voluntary industry scheme which encourages companies to place a statement on invoices declaring the enclosed diamonds to be conflict-free” (Dam-de Jong 2015, p. 223). Nevertheless, it did not take too long for the KP to end up being heavily criticised on account of its apparent inability to improve the situation with the trade of “blood diamonds”. If anything, the founding of the KP has provided 4500 affiliated bureaucrats with the opportunity to make a good living (by mean of introducing more and more diamond-certification regulations) and resulted in increasing the influx of illegal diamonds to the market.
One of the reasons for this is that while imposing more formal restrictions on the trade of diamonds within the industry, the KP informally endorses the continuation of “off-shoring” practices (for tax evasion), on the part of the world largest diamond-exporting companies. Therefore, there is nothing surprising about the fact that ever since the time of the KP’s founding in 2002, the rate of corruption within the industry has been steadily increasing.
The publically assessable statistical data of relevance substantiate the validity of this suggestion. For example, as one can see in the 2018 U.S. Annual Report to the Kimberley Process, there has been a progressing decrease in the number export certificates, issued by the KP through the years 2014-2018 (2014 – 1245 certificates, 2015 – 1111 certificates, 2016 – 1079 certificates, 2017 – 763 certificates). The KP spokesmen’s explanation, in this regard, is that the organisation has been working hard on trying to improve the quality of its warranting procedures, which makes it much harder for the diamond exporters to be certified.
However, as one can infer from the same report, there is no correlation between the mentioned trend and the amount of money that the diamond industry has been generating annually through this specific period (2014 – $591 billion, 2015 – $340 billion, 2016 – $974 billion, 2017 – $755 billion). Yet, there should have been such a correlation if we are to assume that the KP’s activities/initiatives do exert heavy influence on the dynamics in the international diamond market. The absence of such a correlation can mean only one thing. Just as it is the case with many other institutionalised instruments of global governance, the continual enactment of the KP is only beneficiary to its bureaucratic apparatus, which though the last decade has undergone a substantial expansion.
Another piece of supporting evidence that this is indeed the case can serve the data concerning the outbreaks of armed conflicts in Africa throughout the same time-stretch, “In 2007, Africa saw 12 conflicts in 10 countries compared to 18 conflicts in 13 countries in 2017” (Bakken and Rustad 2018, para. 1). Given the fact that one of the KP’s officially proclaimed objectives is to foster peace and stability in Africa, one cannot help but wonder about whether the time has come to dispose of the KP altogether. Evidently enough, there is indeed much similarity between the KP and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the implementation of which has long ago been turned into a billion-dollar industry of its own, preoccupied with selling quotas for carbon monoxide emissions, when there is very little attention paid to whether this has any effect on the surrounding natural environment or not.
Community Resilience through Early Warning (CREW)
Community Resilience through Early Warning (CREW) is the 2012-2015 socio-environmental project under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (sponsored by the UNDP and the Norwegian government) that aims to reduce the severity of natural disasters (droughts and floods) in Ghana, as such that have a strongly negative effect of the functioning of the country’s economy. As it is stated in the CREW: Project Document, “(CREW) aims to build capacities within the country to reduce disaster risk by putting in place an integrated early warning system that is both scientific and people-oriented” (p. 1).
In essence, this early warning system refers the network of interconnected high-tech sensors throughout the country that are there to provide agricultural workers with a timely warning about the anticipated dramatic changes in weather conditions: the main trigger of natural disasters in Ghana.
The first thing that comes in sight, with respect to the earlier quoted constituent document, is that it specifies the project’s budget with perfect exactness: $5.182.667. Also, it contains a detailed list of Norwegian-based companies, chosen to work on the project, and provides a step-by-step plan for distributing the allocated funds among the contractors.
However, while vaguely outlining the project’s objectives, CREW: Project Document leaves much uncertainty as to what should be deemed the measurable criteria for defining the extent of CREW’s successfulness, “Economic and human losses and damages from priority hazards are reduced in the 10 pilot sites by 2015: The appropriate rate of reduction will be determined through the project inception process” (p. 8). This alone raises a certain concern about the CREW, as it bears at least a few easily identifiable marks of a money-laundering scheme (Ganson & Wennmann 2015).
According to the project’s promoters, its completion through the years 2012-2015 should have resulted in providing a statistically identifiable boost to the growth of the country’s economy. However, the available statistical data, in this regard, does not suggest that this has been the case. For example, through the years 2012-2015, the country’s economy has indeed been growing at an annual rate of 2.5%. Still, the starting point of the consistent growth of Ghana’s economy can be traced to as far back as to the year 2001, with the overall growth-rate (through 2001-2015) having accounted for 2.8% (Details of public revenues – Ghana, OECD 2019). This implies that even if the CREW did contribute towards ensuring the growth of Ghana’s economy through the years 2012-2015, this contribution was rather minor.
The same can be said about the project’s impact on the rate of poverty in Ghana. Whereas through the years 2005-2012 this rate has been reduced by 16.60% (from 77.10% to 60.50%), the rate’s reduction through the years 2012-2015 accounted for only 3.60% (Ghana poverty rate 1987-2020 2020). This once again suggests that if anything, the effect of the project’s implementation on the economic well-being of Ghanaians was neglectable or even outright negative.
The most problematic issue with the CREW is that the project does not take into account the main inducing factor behind the periodically occurring natural disasters in Ghana: the process of global warming (Ibarrarán et al. 2009). This global climatic trend presupposes that, as time goes on, natural disasters (especially floods) in Ghana are bound to take place on a far more frequent scale. Therefore, a proper strategy for dealing with the issue must necessarily be long-termed.
As lhassan and Hadwen (2017) aptly observed while referring to the specifics of addressing environmental issues in Ghana, “Though institutional capacity is important for mainstreaming climate change adaptation into policy planning, it is not limited to only capacity building. It is also important to develop and strengthen the structures for institutions to handle climate change issues” (p. 9). The CREW, on the other hand, has been concerned with deploying a purely “technical” approach to mitigating the effects of natural disasters in Ghana on a short-term basis. Because of it, the project can hardly be referred to as the example of truly effective global governance.
Recommendations
The acquired analytical insights into the current workings of global governance, as exemplified by the KP and CREW, suggest that there are two levels to the discussion of what could be done to increase the practical workability of both institutionalised initiatives: technical and ideological. When assessed from the technical point of view, the main driver of inefficiency, with respect to the KP and CREW, appears to be the lack of a reliable auditing-mechanism.
Consequentially, this results in the misuse of funds and serves as a breeding ground for corruption. To address the situation, the high-ranking representatives of both projects should consider signing a contract with a non-Western (to ensure impartiality) auditing firm and requesting the latter to keep a watchful eye on the flow of financial transactions in and out of the associated banking accounts. For as long as the KP is concerned, it could also benefit from reducing its bureaucratic apparatus in size: this will allow allocating more funds for financing the organisation’s activities in the field.
However, the adjustment of merely technical aspects of the KP and CREW’s functioning can do very little, in the sense of helping the concerned global governance initiatives to be brought to a whole new level of operational effectiveness. For such an objective to be reached, the unmistakably Constructivist premise behind the founding of both the KP and CREW must be reassessed as well. For example, even today the KP continues to draw from the assumption that by preventing Africa’s “blood diamonds” from entering the market, the KPSC provides an indispensable contribution in reducing the likelihood for the eruption of violent conflicts across the continent. However, the relevant statistical data suggests that there is very little rationale to consider such an idea even slightly viable.
Therefore, instead of preoccupying itself with expanding the system of diamond warranting and increasing the number of its corporate affiliates, the KP should apply an effort in driving the price of “blood diamonds” to be significantly lower than that of the legitimate ones. One of the ways of how this could be done is investing in the development of technology that would enable the certification of diamonds to be conducted with regard to what accounts for their physical properties. This will allow importers to identify the physical location from which these diamonds came.
For as long as the CREW and its mission of reducing the severity of the consequences of natural disasters in Ghana are concerned, there is a good reason to think that it would be wiser to use the project’s budget for developing the road-infrastructure within the country. After all, it is only the population with access to such infrastructure that will be able to take practical advantage of being warned ahead of time about the forthcoming abrupt changes in weather conditions.
Conclusion
As it was hypothesised initially, it is specifically the Realist (as opposed to Constructivist) approach to understanding the significance of global governance that should be deemed fully legitimate. The author believes that the acquired analytical insights into the topic testify to the overall soundness of this suggestion. The foremost of the former can be summarised as follows:
- The concept of global governance appears to grow increasingly inconsistent with the current geopolitical realities in the world, which began to reflect the “multipolar” essence of international politics as far back into the past as in the late 2000s.
- As time goes on, the role of the UN in facilitating global governance will continue to acquire ever more formal qualities. The decision to intervene in addressing a geographically localised humanitarian, ecological, or economic issue of concern, on the part of the international community, will need to be legitimised on a bilateral basis.
- Statehood failure is predetermined by a number of different internal and external circumstances. However, it is namely the overall weakness of authority-enforcing institutions in a particular country that is most likely to be identified as such that keeps it on the path of losing its sovereignty.
- As exemplified by the KP and CREW, the current cases of global governance being put to work reveal that there is the lack of legitimacy to how the governing agents justify the appropriateness of the would-be undertaken action, on their part. This, in turn, calls for the complete reassessment of the message that the concerned concept currently conveys.
Overall, it can be confirmed that the structures of global governance are neither technically nor ideologically equipped to deal with the drivers of conflicts in fragile states. To be seen as the legitimate subject of organisational improvement, the concept of “global governance” must continue being perceived perfectly consistent with the logic of historical progress. In light of the recent geopolitical developments in the world, however, such a scenario appears to be rather unlikely.
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