Global governance is the governance of the collective action problems that no single state can address alone. Its future depends on whether the states that must cooperate can build the institutions that cooperation requires.
The Collective Action Challenge
Global governance — the institutional frameworks through which sovereign states coordinate their behaviour to address collective action problems that no state can address unilaterally — faces its most demanding period since the post-war institutional construction. The collective action problems that require global governance have never been more urgent: the climate crisis that requires the coordination of emissions reductions across all major emitters, the pandemic preparedness that requires the surveillance and response coordination that the COVID-19 experience demonstrated was inadequate, the AI governance that requires the coordination of safety standards and accountability frameworks across the jurisdictions where AI systems are developed and deployed, and the financial governance that requires the coordination of the cross-border capital flows and the systemic risk management that national financial regulation cannot address alone.
The political conditions for building the global governance frameworks that these collective action problems require are less favourable than they were when the post-war institutional order was constructed. The geopolitical competition between major powers reduces the cooperative incentives that multilateral institution-building requires. The domestic political pressures in major democracies reduce the political will for the international commitments that global governance imposes. And the legitimacy deficits of existing global institutions — the representativeness gaps, the accountability deficits, and the performance failures that have accumulated over decades — reduce the public support for the institutional investments that global governance requires.
The future of global governance is the question whose answer will determine whether the collective action problems that define the current era are addressed or are allowed to accumulate until their costs force the institutional response that adequate governance would have provided earlier at lower cost. The governance window is narrower than the scale of the problems suggests it should be, and the time available for building the institutions that the problems require is shorter than the problems' timelines make visible.
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