Search results

Cover -- Contents -- Notes on the Contributors -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: Globalization and the Double-Movement Hypothesis -- 1 Class, Gender and the Politics of Neoliberal Globalization in the USA -- 2 Egalitarian Social Movements in Western Europe: Can They Survive Globalization and the Economic and Monetary Union? -- 3 Latin America in an Age of Inequality: Confronting the New 'Utopia' -- 4 Engendering Change through Egalitarian Movements: The African Experience -- 5 Egalitarian Responses in Postcommunist Russia -- 6 Nonsocial Movements and Social Nonmovements in China -- 7 Capital, Crisis and Chaos: Indonesia and Malaysia in a Globalizing Era -- 8 Migrant Workers' Movements in Japan and South Korea -- 9 Conclusion: Pinpointing the Significance of Women's Empowerment, Recognizing Political Opportunities, Anticipating Transnational Coalitions -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.

This essay is about the drivers and consequences of changes in the voluntary consensus standard-setting (VCSS) system, the part of the contemporary global governance system that most of us encounter the most frequently, but that we rarely even notice. The VCSS system is made up of thousands of "technical committees" in which hundreds of thousands of experts (most of them engineers) create standards that constantly affect our lives—from the unique number that identifies this journal, to the electronic codes that translated my keystrokes into the words you are reading at the moment, to the rules governing the supply chain for the "fair trade" coffee you may have in a mug by your side. Historian Mark Mazower calls the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the organization that stands at the apex of the largest network of groups that sponsor these technical committees, "perhaps the most influential private organization in the contemporary world, with a vast and largely invisible influence over most aspects of how we live, from the shape of our household appliances to the colors and smells that surround us."

In recent essays, Thomas Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson argue that analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the problems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today. While no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War II and the founding of the postwar UN system - as Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance - to provide valuable insights for contemporary global governance. An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimperial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals of the interimperial system - the economic goals as well as the goal of universalizing and perfecting the state system - also are still with us. Moreover, the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system - the forces that led to change within international governance - remain the same. Attention to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago. Adapted from the source document.

"Unternehmen und Aktivisten im so genannten 'globalen Süden' halten die sozialen und Umweltstandards der Internationalen Organisation für Normierung (ISO) für berechtigt und angemessen. Die Legitimität der Organisation resultiert aus dem zunehmenden Einschluss nicht-westlicher Akteure und Vertreter aus kolonialisierten Gesellschaften in die internationale Standardisierungsbewegung, wobei dieser Prozess lange vor der Gründung der ISO im Jahr 1946 begann. Seit den 1950er Jahren trugen die Vereinten Nationen zur Schaffung von Standardisierungsorganisationen außerhalb Europas und Nordamerikas bei, die über kurz oder lang Teil des Netzwerkes der ISO wurden. In den 1960er Jahren förderte die ISO die Partizipation aus 'südlichen' Weltregionen, und nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges schlossen sich nicht-westliche Standardisierungsorganisationen jenen Lobby-Gruppen an, die neue oder erneuerte Demokratien konsolidierten. Gemeinsam erreichte man, dass sich die ISO auch mit den Bereichen Umwelt und Soziales befasste." (Autorenreferat)

A review essay on books by (1) Becky Mansfield [Ed], Privatization and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); (2) Richard D. Morgenstern & William A. Pizer [Eds], Reality Check: The Nature and Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs in the United States, Europe, and Japan (Washington, DC: Resources for Future, 2007); & (3) Philip H. Pattberg, Private Institutions of Global Governance. The New Politics of Environmental Sustainability (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar).