Projects

Global Governance and Transnational Civil Society

The current array of formal global governance institutions has failed to deliver key global collective goods, ranging from financial stability to environmental sustainability. Yet, there are also examples of surprising effectiveness, ranging from the governance of the Internet to the provision of anti-AIDS drugs to almost 50% of Africans in need of treatment to international rules protecting the ozone layer.  Increasing the share of successes and finding remedies for the failures requires analysis of how different arenas of transnational action are structured and how they are interconnected with each other.

This project looks explicitly at how the interaction of multiple structures of transnational power – hard and soft, public and private, formal and informal, legal and illicit – creates the current matrix of global success and failure.  Researchers working different substantive arenas – from finance to health and the environment to illicit drug traffic and the costs of war – collaborate to compare analytical perspectives on the structure and dynamics of transnational power.

The general analytical issues raised by this vision of global governance and civil society find expression in five different substantive arenas: heath, environment, finance, poverty alleviation and social protection, and violence.