Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics

Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement Between Activists and NGOs

“…Was this co-option of voluntary action?" Radical left critics have argued that NGOs, are "powerful pacific weapons of the new world order" (Hardt and Negri, 2001, 36) and that as part of the neoliberal aid regimes, NGOs emphasize projects over movements thereby mobilising people to protest at the margins but not to struggle against structural conditions that shape everyday lives (Petras, 1997, Lipschutz andRowe, 2005). We found this scathing critique echoed by Vasilis, the Athens activist who also spent years living in the UK: "In Greece you don't have independent NGOs.…”

Challenging Global Finance

“…The theoretical framework employed in this book draws on theories which put forward a broad encompassing definition of power and, in particular, emphasize the power of ideas. In this work the importance of norms, rules and frameworks of belief in shaping the very possibilities of action are recognized (Lukes 1974(Lukes , 2005Foucault 1977;Gramsci 1971;Lipschutz with Rowe 2005;Olesen 2011;Marques and Utting 2010;Moschella 2010;Porter and Ronit 2010a;Kenny and Germain 2005). As Lukes argues, the capacity to set the agenda, to determine the rules of the game in a given time and place and to have them widely accepted as self evident and as the most reasonable choice represents the highest level of power (Lukes 1974: 25).…”

Governing Climate Change Transnationally: Assessing the Evidence from a Database of Sixty Initiatives

“…Transnational relations are usually defi ned as "regular interactions across national boundaries when at least one actor is a nonstate agent or does not operate on behalf of a national government or an international organization" (Risse-Kappen, 1995, page 3). Within the fi eld of transnational governance there has been particular interest in the emergence of forms of private regulation, for some regarded as akin to 'private regimes' (Biermann et al, 2010;Cutler et al, 1999;Falkner, 2003;Hall and Biersteker, 2002;Lipschutz and Rowe, 2005;Pattberg, 2005), on the one hand, and of public-private partnerships, epitomised in the so-called 'type-II' initiatives which emerged in the aftermath of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002 (Andonova, 2010;Andonova and Levy, 2003;Bäckstrand, 2008;Benner et al, 2004;Pinkse and Kolk, 2009), on the other hand. However, recent analysis suggests that the transnational governance phenomenon is not limited to these two ideal types and that a range of other initiatives which fall in between these categorisations have been established which explicitly seek to address environmental issues through constituting new forms of transnational relations (Bulkeley et al, forthcoming;Hoffmann, 2011;Kolk et al, 2010).…”