Mykhalchenko I.G.
National Aviation University , Ukraine
THE MEANING OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
The global processes prevail and in such conditions it should be clear the meaning of global governance. The term “governance” means to regulate, to put in order; to make correct interaction between the parts of mechanism [1]. From the legal point of view this term can be characterized as the process of action by legal norms and other legal means on the conduct of people for the purpose of arrangement, protection and development of public relations [2]; carried out by the state by means of the right and set of legal means of arrangement of public relations, their legal fixing, protection and development [3].
Nowadays the views at the problems of international relations governance test serious changes that are basically connected with structural changes in world economy. Globalization makes active discussions round governance of international trade and other spheres of world economy. Practice addresses to the theory, to search new criteria of interpretation and estimation of events which occur.
During discussions only in the general view there was an understanding of international governance as regulation of separate international processes for the purpose of prevention of their potential negative consequences for the world community [4]. However this definition is not generally accepted, as processes of research of practice of regulation and its separate lines is not finished. Such science officers were engaged in the researches of essence of governance as Friedrichs J., Spaeth K., Groom A., Bull H., Rosenau J., Finkelstein L., Zinchenko F., Zablotska , R., Temnikov D. and others.
There are two main approaches to the interpretation of the global governance – realistic and institutional [4]. For the first, global governance is understood as the mechanism of an equilibration of potentials of the states and is carried out on a basis or balance of forces, or hegemony. The second, accents on the instruments of governance which includes the international institutes, and also interest to the questions connected with formation of universal multilateral global management and withering of state regulation on the basis of mutual relations and cooperation of a narrow circle of the states. These approaches in something supplement each other, in something conflict with each other – depending on a point of view under which consider the government problematics during this or that period of time.
Five truths about global governance [5]:
1. Global governance is an offspring of economic globalization. G lobal governance is intimately linked to economic globalization. It is clear that globalization generates the need some functional equivalent to political government. This is the idea of “global governance”, or “governance without government”, steps in. If the state loses the capacity to perform as the final arbiter in world affairs, the unregulated pluralism of global public policy appears as an interesting alternative. To support this idea, it is assumed that economic globalization does not only lead to the retreat of the state, but also to the formation of global civil society. Not only does the retreat of the state create a demand for some functional equivalent to political government, but the advent of global civil society does also create the possibility for global governance to perform as a substitute for international politics. The promise of global governance is that global civil society is in a position to fill the regulative gap created by economic globalization and the concomitant retreat of the state. Global governance is supposed to take over where government has lost its steering capacity.
2. One should be careful not to romanticize global civil society. As a m atter of fact, it is a naive prejudice to presume that global society is always or prevalently civil. It should not be ignored that transnational terrorism and organized crime are an important part of global society, whether civil or not. There is no reason why world society should be more immune from corruption by criminal elements than domestic societies. In some instances global governance will turn out to be a good thing, while in other instances it will turn out to be a mess. Global governance should be welcomed as a possible solution to some problems, but it is no panacea against all dilemmas of collective action.
3. Global governance has an Anglo-American cultural imprint. It is hard to translate “governance” into languages other than English, where the Oxford English Dictionary traces the term back well into the 14 century. Given its difficult translatability into languages other than English, it is reasonable to assume that the term “global governance” is culturally not neutral. With its adoption into other linguistic environments, global governance transports part of the conceptual universe of English language in general, and of American social science in particular, into different cultural and academic contexts.
4. Global governance has a transatlantic organizational bias. There is a broad consensus that without a strong field of non-state actors there is no “governance without government”. Among the most important of those non-state actors are nongovernmental organizations, which are unevenly distributed over the world. This can be easily demonstrated by figures from the Yearbook of International Organizations. According to this statistical source, 59 % of all nongovernmental organizations have their headquarters in Europe . This is probably due to Europe ’s national fragmentation, which leads to a multiplication of small and medium-sized nongovernmental organizations. When adding the American percentage to the European share, the Western world scores 85 % of all NGO headquarters worldwide. One may deplore it, but the non-Western world in general and the Third World in particular is clearly not in centre stage of global governance.
5. More often than not, ideas about global governance are inherently economistic . An important branch of the global governance literature is characterized by a highly ambiguous relationship with politics and political science. On the one hand, global governance is said to be the political answer to globalization and the retreat of the state. On the other hand, it is generally defined as “governance without government” and therefore hardly fits with the conventional image of politics as the authoritative allocation of values ( Easton , 1971). As a device to overcome market failures and problems of collective action, global governance is closer to the logic of rational-choice institutionalism than to the logic of political action.
Global governance can thus be seen as an institution, or rather as a set of institutions, composed of organizations (i.e., governments, NGOs, and TNCs ), each of which no longer has enough power to “govern” by itself [6]. If socio-democratic approach sees global governance as, by definition, a more appropriate approach to solving increasingly global problems, the socio-democratic vision of globalization see global governance as a moment in history during which existing rules, institutional arrangements, and power relationships among actors are being re-defined. Thus from an organizational and institutional perspective, globalization is therefore a process in which some actors pursue defined interests, while others might have an interest in maintaining the status quo. It is also a process in which actors can win or can lose depending on whether the new rules and institutional arrangements do or do not favor them. Globalization, as a process of re-defining the rules, is thus also a challenge for each of the involved organization/actor, obliging it to strategize and take actions in order to shape the new rules and institutional arrangements, and to reposition itself favorably within the new institutional framework.
The list of references:
1. Словник іншомовних сл ів / [за ред. О.С. Мельничука]. – К.: Головна редакція УРЕ Академії наук УРСР, 1975. – С. 574.
2. Загальна теорія держави і права / [М. В. Цвік , В. Д. Ткаченко, О. В. Петришин та ін .]. – Х.: Право, 2002. – 432 с .
3. Вікіпедія : в ільна енциклопедія [ Електронний ресурс] . – Режим доступу: http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Правове_регулювання .
4. Темников Д.М. Проблемы мирового регулирования в современной зарубежной политологии / Д.М. Темников // Международные процессы. – 2004. – Т.2, № 2 (5). – С. 84-96.
5. Friedrichs J. Global Governance as the Transatlantic Project of Civil Society [ Електронний ресурс] // Challenging Global Governance : A Critical Perspective / J. Friedrichs . – ELRC / CPOGG: Harvard Law School , 2003. – P. 53-78. – [Режим доступу]: http://www.cpogg.org/reader/The%20CPOGG%20Reader.pdf .
6. Finger M. Global Governance through the Institutional Lense // Criticizing Global Governance . – New York : Palgrave , 2005. – P. 145-159.