This forthcoming handbook represents the culmination of the mapping exercise undertaken, also known as the project entitled Handbook of Innovation in Transnational Governance.
When we speak of 'global governance' today, we no longer mean simply state-to-state diplomacy, international treaties, or intergovernmental organisations like the United Nations. Alongside these 'traditional' elements of global politics are a host of new mechanisms ranging from global networks of governmental officials, to private codes of conduct for corporations, to action-oriented partnerships of NGOs, governments, corporations, and other actors. These innovative mechanisms offer intriguing solutions to the challenges of managing globalisation even as they raise new questions about the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance.
A rapidly expanding body of scholarship encompassing various theoretical and methodological approaches has sought to identify and assess these new forms of governance, and, in many cases, to suggest how they might be reformed or expanded. Scholars and practitioners have also invested considerable effort in imagining new governance mechanisms and techniques to improve the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance.
Lacking from this growing, young body of work is a concrete sense of the larger picture. Scholars tend either to focus narrowly on a single aspect or mechanism of governance—e.g. product certification schemes, the "responsibility to protect," the Global Fund—or to speak in very general terms about abstract trends—e.g. disaggregation, privatization, networks. Work that combines both "micro" and "macro" approaches tends to focus on a single issue area—e.g. studying the World Commission on Dams, a multi-stakeholder dialogue, as an example of the increasing diversity of international actors. All these approaches are necessary for developing a coherent picture of global governance and for imaging how it might/should develop in the future. But how they fit into the larger universe of global governance is often underspecified.
This volume aims to present a broad overview of the new transnational governance by collecting a wide range of short articles describing the most important examples thereof. The volume will span all types of mechanisms and issue areas, aiming to provide the reader a sense of the extent of recent innovations in global governance. While a truly comprehensive overview is not possible, the aim is to create a thorough map of existing governance mechanisms.