Global Governance of the Polycentric World: Actors, Architecture, Hierarchy of Issue Areas

Abstract

Global governance is one of the most contested concepts today. In the last two decades, it has changed on many grounds—as an ideology in the context of the apparent failure of neoliberalism, as an institutional model in terms of the composition of actors and the balance of power, and as a political platform for world order structural changes, finally, as a means of addressing not only the traditional issues of the international agenda but also new transnational challenges. Compared to the 1990s, the heyday of “late” globalization, there is a certain pessimism about the analytical value of the concept and the real possibilities of global governance. The degree of recognition of the concept is declining along with the number of references, which indicates a relative marginalization, ambiguous perception, and overall precariousness of global governance in academic and practical terms. At the same time, the fact of global governance itself is not disputed, although the fragmented nature of its current model with many gaps and pain points is fully recognized. However, given the complexity of the international system, the importance of global governance is greater than ever before. As the nature of common global challenges becomes more complex, the need to manage the international system only increases.