Global Governance Initiative

The existing states in the international system have created a universal consensus on the need to confront global challenges through documents such as the United Nations Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Though they have established finite goals and timelines, it is a virtually certainty that they will not meet their targets. What is more, many related problems receive little coordinated attention, but instead a wide array of competing, overlapping, variably effective, and often wasteful efforts.

It is clear, however, that where progress is achieved towards the goals, the process involves a range of actors acting in pre-determined concert with assigned roles, responsibilities, lines of authority and accountability. Such mechanisms represent the de facto practice of diplomacy for many of the most vital issues the international community faces today. Yet there is no law, code or framework to encompass this reality. In this emerging world society of states, corporations, activist/advocacy organizations, international institutions, religious groups, and philanthropists, common structures of legal accountability can be created to harness and unleash the collective energies required from all actors to ever potentially achieve the goals to which all governments?

The New America Foundation’s Global Governance Initiative moves beyond the narrow conception of global problem-solving as an inter-state diplomatic enterprise by exploring the existing modes of successful cooperation among an array of diverse actors in areas deemed of greatest importance by the international community: Security, Health, Poverty, and Environment. Which models are most effective and scaleable? Which actors are contributing the most resources? What international legal frameworks can be created to capture this new diplomatic context? How is American foreign policy affected by such a diverse array of domestic actors playing these diplomatic roles?

Through issue-oriented seminars, policy papers, public events, and eventually a book it will both re-frame the currently institutionally-biased discussions of global governance and produce concrete recommendations towards more flexible and effective structures appropriate to the 21st century context of diffusing power and legitimacy. The Global Governance Initiative is directed by Parag Khanna, who is also a Senior Research Fellow at New America.

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