Category Archives: Global governance

ISA 2018 Roundtable on Global Governance

Last month I hosted a roundtable at the International Studies Association Conference 2018 in San Francisco. We had a brilliant group of participants to take stock of recent rapid developments in global governance scholarship.

Continue reading ISA 2018 Roundtable on Global Governance

Global Policy Special Issue on Global Governance

David Coen and I have convened a new Special Section in the journal Global Policy (Volume 9, Issue 1), featuring contributions from pioneering thinkers in global governance, working across theoretical, analytical and issue-area boundaries. Reflecting upon the distance travelled by global governance research in recent years, the collection aims to identify promising lines of future inquiry and galvanise further scholarly innovation into how, ultimately, collective action can be achieved on an unprecedented scale to respond to the most pressing global policy challenges of our time.  Continue reading Global Policy Special Issue on Global Governance

Is the Paris climate accord worded too flexibly?

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced last week that the 2015 Paris climate change accords will, in all likelihood, go into effect this year. These accords commit the U.S. and dozens of other nations to try to lower greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change.

But devising multilateral agreements is painstaking work. Typically, negotiators from hundreds of states deliberate for many years. Any agreement they reach often involves major compromises, which means provisions that experts consider important tend to be watered down

Nowhere is this more apparent than the case of the Paris Climate Change Accords. To break decades of multilateral gridlock on climate change, negotiators followed the mantra don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But is there a cost to being flexible?

Strong words make treaties more effective. So is the Paris climate accord worded too flexibly?

Katerina Linos and Tom Pegram

Washington Post-The Monkey Cage, 29 September 2016.

 

Supporting a rules-based international order

One of the more unusual invitations to land in my inbox, on 3 November 2016 I gave evidence on global governance and a rules-based international order to the Liberal Democrat policy working group on international affairs.   The working group has been established by the parliamentary party to examine and update party policy on Britain’s role in the world. Continue reading Supporting a rules-based international order