Global Challenges and Multi-Level-Governance
Dominic Roser and Jack Baker
Many of today’s key challenges are global. Finding fair and effective solutions to these challenges would benefit significantly from global coordination and, presumably, from shifting political authority from the national to the global level. This requires strengthening existing global institutions (e.g. with the possibility to arrive at binding decisions and accompanying sanction mechanisms) as well as setting up new ones. However, governance at the global level is only building up slowly, it is accompanied by grave legitimacy deficits, and the resulting decisions score low in terms of effectively and fairly solving the challenges they are meant to address. As prominent as some global governance mechanisms may seem in public debate, the lion’s share of decision-making power still lies at the national level.
Importantly, where global governance is emerging it is interwoven in complex ways with national decision-making. The resulting multi-level governance and contains much potential for inefficiency and inconsistency. Coordinating the interplay between national and global governance and ensuring the transmission of legitimacy from one level to the other brings up a host of novel questions, often hidden in the messiness of the intricate decision-making structures which combine national and global inputs.
One paradigmatic example of the challenges involved in multi-level governance can be found in the area of climate governance. Given the empirical features of the climate challenge, international negotiations first aimed the vision of a grand top-down binding international treaty. In the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations, this vision slowly lost ground and the Paris negotiations in 2015 resulted in a more bottom-up approach. This back-and-forth raises the question whether it is realistic and desirable to shift authority as quickly as possible from the national to the international level. Also, further levels of governance – such as cities or business – stepped in where the formal national and international process only made slow progress. This contributes to a just solution but it further exacerbates legitimacy questions which were already pressing given the unclear division of labour between the global and the national level. The Paris approach relies much on pledges by individual nations. However, nations often struggle to live up their promises which they regularly undershoot or overshoot. It is unclear whether such disharmony between international commitments and domestic implementation should be seen as a serious flaw or as a minor problem on the slow, tortuous, and complex road towards shifting authority from the national to the global level. These are just illustrative examples from one area. Further topics include:
- The international response to Covid
- Tax competition
- Democratic deficits in international institutions such as the UN
- Sanction mechanisms of international institutions such as the WTO
- National funding of institutions such as the WHO
- Universal Periodic Reviews of the human rights records of UN member states
- Disharmony between global decisions and national implementation
- Professional ethics for the role of international negotiators
- National referendums on international treatises
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14:00-16:00 |
Session 1 Pierre André & Alice Pirlot: Are Carbon Border Adjustment Measures Fair? Danielle Wenner: International Health Research, Global Governance, and the Scope of Priority-Setting Obligations |
16:00-16:30 |
Tea and Coffee Break (optional) |
16:30-17:30 |
Session 1 (continued) Kian Mintz-Woo: Responsibility for Climate Loss and Damage
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14:00-16:00 |
Session 3 Dominic Roser & Jack Baker: Tackle Climate Change, Harmonization Be Damned Maximillian Afnan: Global Public Reason: Too Thick or Too Thin? |
16:00-16:30 |
Tea and Coffee Break (optional) |
16:30-17:30 |
Session 3 (continued) Antonia Holland-Cunz: A globalized version of the European Union: Problems and opportunities |