Before turning to the activities that seek to fulfil the above objectives it is necessary to examine contemporary historical developments that have prompted the Building Global Democracy programme, as well as general questions that any initiative on this subject must address. 

 

‘Global’ social relations transpire when persons have interchanges and interdependencies across spaces of planetary extent. Globality interlinks people wherever on earth they might be located. Prominent examples of such ‘transplanetary’ social connectivity include climate change, foreign exchange transactions, humanitarian relief, intercontinental missiles, the internet and major consumer brand goods. In these and countless further cases, social relations unfold in global domains.

 

As widespread contemporary use of the term ‘globalization’ suggests, recent history has witnessed major expansion of the global dimensions of social life. To be sure, globality is by no means new, and on the contrary has significantly shaped many human lives for centuries, e.g. through the slave trade and certain world religions. However, following the past half-century of accelerated globalization, transplanetary relations have today reached an unprecedented and qualitatively larger scale, range, frequency, speed, intensity and impact. By one multifaceted index developed at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, global connectedness across the world as a whole has, on a scale of 0-1, risen from 0.23 in 1982 to 0.68 in 2004.

 

Both materially and ideationally, social relations today operate substantially through global frames. In terms of concrete flows, people can have transplanetary connections through communications, merchandise, microbes, migrants, money, organizations, pollutants, weapons, and more. Concurrently, human experience has generally acquired greater global consciousness: that is, people have a heightened awareness of planetary realms as a significant aspect of their social existence, for example, with global symbols, global narratives and global solidarities.

 

None of this is to say that heightened globalization of recent history has made regional, country and local domains irrelevant in society. On the contrary, these spaces and associated structures of production, governance and identity remain highly vibrant in today’s more global world. The global does not erase other scales of social relations, but co-exists with them in complex interrelations.

 

The more global quality of contemporary society is not inherently a good or a bad thing. In principle, the growth of transplanetary relations among people could raise cultural creativity, democracy, ecological care, economic efficiency, moral standards, social justice, and peace. On the other hand, globalization could also involve heightened insecurity, intolerance and destruction. Neither the positive results nor the negative outcomes are intrinsic to increased global connectivity per se. The actual consequences of globalization – good or bad – are a function of the policies that people adopt.

 

Indeed, most of the main public policy challenges facing the world today have significant transplanetary aspects. A global orientation is vital to address problems of arms proliferation, citizen empowerment, crime, decent work, distributive justice, energy supply, environmental degradation, financial instability, human rights violations, infectious disease, intercultural polarization, material welfare, and more. Not surprisingly, therefore, recent years have seen increased talk of the need for ‘global governance’. 

 

Like all realms of social relations, global social relations require governance: that is, an array of rules along with regulatory institutions to administer those norms and standards. As any arena of human collective life becomes significant – be it a neighbourhood, a country or whatever – frameworks of governance develop to bring a certain order and predictability to that sphere. Rules are set, maintained, revised and enforced. The rules may be strict or loose, formal or informal, permanent or transitory, enabling or oppressive. But regulation of some kind there will be if a given social space is to be sustained over any period of time. Moreover, by developing and harnessing governance apparatuses people gain possibilities to shape change in desired directions.

 

These truisms hold for global domains also. The intense globalization of recent history has entailed, as part of the process, increased governance of transplanetary affairs as well. Rules and regulatory institutions have proliferated for global communications, global ecology, global finance, global health, global migration, global security, global trade, and so on. Substantial parts of these regimes are poorly visible to the general public, but their impacts are no less significant for that.

 

The regulation of global affairs – or global governance in shorthand – involves complex networks of institutions. Many sites for governing transplanetary relations are found in older institutions such as nation-states and substate governments. It is therefore not the case that intensified globalization of recent history has brought a decline of the territorial state. On the contrary, the viability of global relations is often substantially dependent on national and local regulatory arrangements, such as tax measures that favour global investment, health services that counter global diseases, and national human rights commissions that monitor the implementation of global norms within their respective territories. Thus global governance is very much a question of the state.

 

At the same time, however, global governance also involves much more than the state. Growing needs to govern global matters have prompted a proliferation and growth of suprastate regulatory arrangements over recent decades. Many of these institutions have a regional basis, covering a number of contiguous countries. Regional governance has expanded especially in relation to global trade. In addition, significant regional regulatory arrangements have developed to address concerns with global human rights, global security challenges, and in recent years also global money flows.

 

Not surprisingly, intense contemporary globalization has also involved the emergence and expansion of regulatory agencies that have planetary jurisdictions and constituencies. The globe-spanning governance institutions have taken a variety of forms, including intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations (UN), transgovernmental networks like the Group of Eight (G8), interregional apparatuses like the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), translocal schemes like United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), private regulatory mechanisms like the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and public-private hybrid formations (also called multistakeholder forums) like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In this sense global-scale regulatory agencies now involve ‘multiple multilateralisms’, as against the single form of intergovernmental multilateralism that prevailed until the 1970s.

 

The governance of global affairs is therefore quite complex. It does not occur through a global government, in the sense of a single, centralized, sovereign, public planet-spanning entity. Moreover, nothing in current trends suggests the future emergence of a world state, in the sense of a nation-state expanded to planetary proportions. Instead, the regulation of global matters is and looks to remain: diffuse (working through multiple institutions that often lack a clear hierarchy and an explicit coordination); trans-scalar (working through interconnected bodies with respective local, national, regional and global jurisdictions); and trans-sectoral (working through agencies with public, private and hybrid characters). Current research and advocacy faces a major challenge to understand the operations of these complex regulatory arrangements and to use that knowledge to shape the governance of global affairs in positive directions. 

 

Key to achieving these positive directions in transplanetary regulation is democracy. Under a principle of ‘rule by and for the people’, the public – or demos – decides the policies that shape its common life and joint destiny. To be sure, democracy has taken highly diverse forms in different times and places. However, in broad terms democracy can be said to prevail when a given people takes its public policy decisions collectively, with equal opportunities for participation, non-coercively, transparently, and responsibly.

 

Democracy is vital to human livelihoods and a good society inasmuch as regulatory arrangements that lack ‘rule by and for the people’ normally fall short in respect of both effectiveness and legitimacy. Undemocratic policies tend to be ineffective, in that governance which does not involve, and answer to, the people that it impacts is unlikely to meet the needs of those stakeholders adequately. Undemocratic policies also tend to be illegitimate, in that governance which does not involve, and answer to, the affected people generally does not garner the support of those constituents.

 

To be sure, democracy is not the sole ingredient for effective and legitimate governance of global affairs. Other qualities such as technical competence, constitutional legality, moral integrity and dynamic leadership are also required. Yet democracy is arguably an indispensable ingredient to positive governance. Democracy has intrinsic merit in terms of promoting human dignity, enhancing human potentials, building human solidarities, and checking abuses of power. Democracy often (albeit not always) also helps to advance other primary attributes of human livelihood and a good society such as cultural vibrancy, distributive justice, ecological integrity, material well-being, moral fibre, and peace.

 

Thus democratic governance of global affairs – or ‘global democracy’, to put the issue less cumbersomely – is not an optional extra. It is a vital attribute of effective and legitimate public policy in the contemporary more global world. Given these high stakes, it is striking and regrettable that – in contrast to the many major research programmes that have developed across the world concerning global economic welfare, global security threats and global ecological changes – similar large systematic efforts have not attended to issues of global democracy. Amidst worries about competition, violence and environmental crisis in contemporary globalization, democracy easily gets lost in the research and policy shuffle. The Building Global Democracy programme is meant as one initiative to right this imbalance.

 

Attention to this matter is all the more important given five large shortfalls that currently prevail with regard to democracy in the governance of global affairs. For one thing there is considerable conceptual uncertainty concerning the form(s) that democracy should take in respect of global politics. What does ‘rule by and for the people’ look like when governance involves substantially more than the territorial nation-state? A second major problem is widespread low citizen awareness about the governance of global relations. A working democracy rests in part on proactive knowledgeable citizens; yet current pedagogies for public learning about global issues and the policies that shape them are generally lacking. A third general democratic failing in contemporary global politics concerns shortfalls of public accountability with respect to the complex institutional networks that govern transplanetary issues. Thus many affected people, particularly in subordinate social positions, are not able adequately to access the sites of decision taking and involve themselves, directly or indirectly, in processes of formulating, implementing, monitoring and correcting public policies on global matters. A fourth set of democratic failings involves structural inequalities. That is, various entrenched hierarchies arbitrarily give certain geographical areas (e.g. countries of the global north and major urban centres) and certain social circles (e.g. managers and men) disproportionate resources and power in the governance of global affairs. A fifth principal way that global democracy is lacking today occurs through the nonrecognition of various political-cultural identities. Prevailing global governance arrangements tend to define ‘the demos’ in terms of national communities connected to existing states. As a result, other collective identities (e.g. like indigenous peoples and faith groups) tend to get marginalized and excluded in public policy decision-taking on global matters.

 

Needless to say these five core problems – underdeveloped concepts, learning gaps, insufficiently accountable institutions, structural inequalities, and unrecognized identities – intertwine and often exacerbate one another. Thus, for example, existing curricula on global politics tend to overlook and silence subordinated communities, and structural maldistributions of resources generally translate into unequal accountabilities in global public policy. Given these tight interrelations, a substantial action-oriented research programme needs to examine these five challenges concurrently, systematically and in depth.

 

In so doing the present Building Global Democracy programme draws insights from – and in the process goes beyond – several approaches in the existing academic literature on global democracy. From cosmopolitan thinkers (e.g. Danielle Archibugi, Richard Falk, David Held, Kimberly Hutchings, Andrew Linklater and George Monbiot) the programme adopts the notion that global democracy must operate at least in part beyond the country sphere. From multilateralist conceptions (e.g. by Allen Buchanan, Robert Keohane, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Michael Zürn) the programme takes the idea that suprastate institutions must be subjected to processes of democratic accountability in order to bolster their effectiveness and legitimacy. From critical political economy researchers (e.g. Walden Bello, Stephen Gill, Ronaldo Munck, Heikki Patomäki and Sol Picciotto) the programme incorporates the premise that redressing structural inequalities of resources and power constitutes a sine qua non for the democratization of global politics. From poststructuralists (e.g. William Connolly, Catherine Eschle, Michael Hardt and Rob Walker) the programme emphasizes the need in a more plural global society to relate democracy not only to the nation, but also to other kinds of collective identity and solidarity.