As indicated earlier, the BGD programme pursues its objectives (as set out on pp. 5-6) and overarching questions (as set out on pp. 11-13) through five complementary and mutually enhancing streams of work. Each of the five projects addresses one of the main challenges of building global democracy (as set out on pp. 9-10): namely, conceptual clarification, citizen learning, institutional accountability, structural redistribution, and intercultural recognition. In addition, a pilot project has been run in 2006-8 to develop and refine the programme methodology (as set out on pp. 13-18).

 

It is of course not possible comprehensively to cover each and every problem of democratizing the governance of global affairs. However, the projects described below systematically and carefully examine key and relatively (in some cases severely) neglected issues. Together – and particularly when pursued in holistic fashion as interrelated dimensions of a single problematic – the five projects can break significant new ground on a key intellectual and policy challenge. 

 

This pilot project for the BGD programme investigates how civil society engagement of global-scale regulatory agencies has and has not furthered the public accountability of those institutions. A more global world needs more regulatory apparatuses with planetary coverage; however, for such global-scale governance arrangements to be effective and legitimate they must be accountable to the publics that they affect. Key mechanisms of democratic accountability that operate in relation to modern states (such as elected leadership, parliamentary oversight and nonpartisan courts) are not available to citizens in respect of global regulatory bodies. In these circumstances many have looked to civil society activities to fill the accountability gaps.

 

This project assesses whether, in what ways and to what extents civil society has in practice contributed to accountable global governance. The enquiry assembles 15 authors from 11 countries on 5 continents to examine civil society engagement of 13 global-scale regulatory institutions. The case studies consider intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, transgovernmental networks like the Group of Eight, interregional arrangements like the Asia-Europe Meeting, private governance agencies like the International Fair Trade Association, and multistakeholder constructions like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

 

The project workshop was held in Gothenburg on 13-15 June 2007 and involved 65 participants from 28 countries. The meeting undertook searching interregional, intercultural, interdisciplinary explorations of ‘global governance’, ‘accountability’ and ‘civil society’, as well as the relationship between them. Each of a dozen draft case studies was discussed by an official from the agency concerned and by a veteran civil society campaigner on the institution in question. Several of these writings have subsequently been posted online as working papers of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR).

 

Final versions of the conceptual framework and the case studies will appear in an edited volume published by Cambridge University Press entitled Global Citizenship in Action? Civil Society and Accountable Global Governance. The book release will be accompanied by the issuance of a policy brief. Ahead of publication project results have been presented at the conference of the Globalization Studies Network in August 2008, at the United Nations in New York on 5 November 2008, and at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC on 6 November 2008.

 

Funding for the pilot project (to a total of US$80,000) has been provided by CSGR, the Ford Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), and the United Nations University (UNU).