“Confusion is a fundamental state of mind”—On the peculiar intellectual career of global governance in international relations

Abstract

More than 20 years after global governance was introduced to the discipline of International Relations (IR), confusion about its conceptual status remains. In fact, how to even speak and think global governance-whether as a description of world politics, as a theoretical perspective to explain it, or as a normative notion to be realized through global policy-remains debated. This state of confusion affects debates within the Political Science subfield of IR as well as dialogue between different disciplines beyond IR. More specifically, the article argues that the current state of confusion exists not because of a lack of debate but rather because of different understandings of global governance that were attached to the concept during its emergence and which are still advanced and reproduced within debates today. These different understandings have their origin in certain real-world and disciplinary dynamics and constitute global governance in present discourse as a "condensation symbol" of different meanings. It is argued that precisely because of this status, global governance has obtained its "celebrity status", within and beyond IR. By structuring different understandings of global governance and by reconstructing real-world and disciplinary contexts of emergence, the article goes beyond stating the obvious and provides a discussion of various sources and consequences of the confusion surrounding global governance. On the basis of this state-of-the-art overview, it is argued that to realize the full potential of global governance in IR and ensure interdisciplinary dialogue beyond it, one needs to engage with the concept and its immanent confusion in a reflective and cautious way by becoming aware of different meanings attached to it instead of arbitrarily reducing the concept to a single meaning to define its conceptual status. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on global governance.

Exploring the Nexus and Utilities Between Regional and Global Ocean Governance Architecture

“…Evidence from literature, a systematic analysis of GOG in the face of globalisation and the emergence of Africa's ROG, and the general analysis of four policy domains of ocean governance mentioned earlier (maritime security, ocean environment, ocean economy, and socio-political dimension) lay the basis for identifying a typology of relationship between ROG and GOG mechanism. They provided the platform to diagnose the most prevalent arguments (e.g., Fazekas and Burns, 2012;Hofferberth, 2016;Meltzer, 2021) that regional governance's effectiveness is directly related to the nature of the interaction between regional governance schemes and global governance; and viceversa.…”

Global governance and the Global Green New Deal: the G7’s role

“…Global governance approaches to IR reflect the increasing role 'global society' plays in norm creation (Barnett and Sikkink, 2011: p. 748). However, the popularity of global governance in academic literature has resulted in a measure of conceptual fuzziness (Hofferberth, 2016). As such, global governance is viewed as a policy notion, an empirical condition, and an analytical tool (Hofferberth, 2016).…”

Weaving the Tapestry of Life: The United Nations and Global Governmentality

“…The study of different international, and later global governance arrangements has been if seen as a legitimate subfield within IR (Hofferberth, 2016) 11situated primarily in the broadly understood liberal tradition, distinguished for seeking the possibility of peace through the study of cooperation. From the earliest, highly normative theories of world federalism or world government, through ideas of institutionalism and collective security, to neo-liberal theories of institutions, interdependence, and transnational social cooperation, liberal IR has always fostered the idea of regulating and tempering international relations through cooperation (Doyle, 1983, Keohane and Nye, 1977Keohane, 1989;Keohane and Martin, 1995;Rosenau, 1997;Ikenberry, 2009;Mazower, 2012;Szűcs, 2017).…”

“…This duality is acknowledged by the majority of the literature, which tends to see the publication of Governance without Government by Rosenau and Czempiel in 1992 and that of the CGG's report Our Global Neighbourhood in 1995, along with the first issue of the journal Global Governance as a 'holy trinity' in the conception of the term. The 'overlapping contexts of emergence' (Hofferberth, 2016) in terms of 'realworld context' and 'disciplinary context', however, should only be separated provisionally, for analytical purposes as the point is exactly to see global governance in its complexity: its peculiarity is that we are not facing a mere theoretical innovation, but an idea which has, for long been deeply embedded in the structures of global decisionmaking.…”

“…As opposed to this, I aim to show how "attempts to reduce the concept to a particular meaning does not appear to be the most preferable strategy for sharpening its analytical value" (Hofferberth, 2016). An immediate cause for this lies in the interconnectedness of knowledge and power, an issue that is absolutely central to this study and will be elaborated in detail later on.…”