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http://www.cfr.org/content/thinktank/CFR_Global%20_Governance_%20Program.pdf
{Co-ordinating with his "Obama": -- Lloyd}
International Institutions and Global Governance Program
World Order in the 21st Century
A New Initiative of the Council on Foreign Relations
May 1, 2008
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has launched a comprehensive five-year program on international institutions and global governance. The purpose of this cross-cutting initiative is to explore the institutional requirements for world order in the twenty-first century. The undertaking recognizes that the architecture of global governance-largely reflecting the world as it existed in 1945-has not kept pace with fundamental changes in the international system, including but not limited to globalization. Existing multilateral arrangements thus provide an inadequate foundation for addressing today's most pressing threats and opportunities and for advancing U.S. national and broader global interests. The program seeks to identify critical weaknesses in current frameworks for multilateral cooperation; propose specific reforms tailored to new global circumstances; and promote constructive U.S. leadership in building the capacities of existing organizations and in sponsoring new, more effective regional and global institutions and partnerships. This program is made possible by a generous grant from the Robina Foundation.
The program draws on the resources of CFR's David Rockefeller Studies Program to assess existing regional and global governance mechanisms and offer concrete recommendations for U.S. policymakers on specific reforms needed to improve their performance, both to advance U.S. national interests and to ensure the provision of critical global public goods. The program will take an issue area approach, focusing on arrangements governing state conduct and international cooperation in meeting four broad sets of challenges: (1) Countering Transnational Threats, including terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and infectious disease; (2) Protecting the Environment and Promoting Energy Security; (3) Managing the Global Economy; and (4) Preventing and Responding to Violent Conflict. In each of these spheres, the program will consider whether the most promising framework for governance is a formal organization with universal membership (e.g., the United Nations); a regional or sub-regional organization; a narrower, informal coalition of like-minded countries; or some combination of all three. Building on these issue-area investigations, the program will also consider the potential to adapt major bedrock institutions (e.g., the UN, G8, NATO, IMF) to meet today's challenges, as well as the feasibility of creating new frameworks. It will also address the participation of non-state actors.
The program falls squarely within CFR's historic mission as an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens
in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. In fulfilling its mandate, the program draws on the CFR's unique attributes as a premier think tank on matters of foreign policy; as a prominent forum for convening American and international statesmen and opinion leaders; and as a platform for forging bipartisan consensus on the priorities, terms, and conditions of the nation's global engagement. Throughout its activities, CFR will engage stakeholders and constituencies in the United States
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and abroad, including governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society representatives, and the private sector, whose input and endorsement are critical to ensure the appropriateness and feasibility of any institutional reforms. The program is led by Senior Fellow Stewart Patrick. This concept note summarizes the rationale for the program, describes potential areas of research and policy engagement, and outlines the envisioned products and activities. We believe that the research and policy agenda outlined here constitutes a potentially significant contribution to U.S. and international deliberations on the requirements for world order in the twenty-first century. RATIONALE AND CONTEXT The Significance of the Issue The creation of new frameworks for global governance will be a defining challenge for the twenty-first century world, and the attitude of the United States will be among the most important factors in determining the shape and stability of the world order that results from these efforts. The need for a reformed, robust system of multilateral cooperation has never been more obvious. Today's global agenda is dominated by a host of issues-from terrorism to climate change to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction-that no single country, no matter how powerful, can address on its own. Tomorrow's challenges and policy agendas will only be more transnational in scope. At the same time, existing multilateral institutions are increasingly divorced from global realities, hindering their capacity to deliver global public goods and mitigate global "bads." Since the end of the Cold War, world politics have been transformed in fundamental ways. As outlined in the accompanying box, these changes include an ongoing shift in global power to non-Western countries; the rise of transnational threats to the top of the global security and development agendas; a growing concern with state weakness, as opposed to state strength; the emergence of agile and increasingly powerful non-state actors (both malignant and benign); the evolution of new norms of state sovereignty and new criteria for armed intervention; the proliferation of regional and sub-regional organizations; the increasing importance of cross-border networks; and a growing reliance on ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" as an adjunct to-and sometimes a replacement for-more formal, standing international bodies. A New World The point of departure for the program is a recognition that the world of 1945 has evolved dramatically, fundamentally, and irrevocably. New rules and institutions of global governance will need to take into account several fundamental changes in world politics. These include: − A shift in power to the global "South." While the United States remains at the apex of the international system, the global distribution of power-political, economic, demographic, technological, and to some degree military- is shifting toward the developing world, driven by the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other nations (and the relative decline of Europe). Core international institutions, from the UN Security Council to the Group of Eight industrialized nations (G-8), have not yet adapted to accommodate these seismic shifts, reducing both their perceived legitimacy and their practical effectiveness. − The rise of transnational threats. While great power war will always be possible in a system of sovereign states, the principal foreign policy challenges of the twenty-first century are likely to be transnational threats-from terrorism to pandemics to climate change. Such challenges will necessitate new forms of institutionalized cooperation and pose particular challenges to the United States, historically ambivalent toward multilateral institutions. |
