Key issues for global governance in 2030

Citation

Petit, P.M. and Guttman, R. (2014), "Key issues for global governance in 2030", Foresight, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-02-2014-0011

Key issues for global governance in 2030

Article Type:

Guest editorial

From:

Foresight, Volume 16, Issue 2

Introduction to the Foresight Special Issue

We experienced a major global financial crisis in 2008/2009. Five years later the world economy has not yet really recovered. This applies obviously to Europe, still fighting its own systemic crisis. But even in the US economic activities and employment are still doing poorly, notwithstanding the Fed’s impressive policy of "quantitative easing" to boost investments. In addition, emerging economies have not yet succeeded to decouple their growth dynamics from those of the developed world, thus having to face a dampening of their own growth potential due to the continued stagnation of the latter. Finance is certainly to blame for a lot of these deadlocks. Reform of the financial system may be on its way, even though it is bound to be a lengthy and uneven process. Still, recovery policies have shown that it is not the only problem. The world is facing a global governance crisis affecting not only the financial system, but also, in one way or another, all the fields where this global governance is taking shape, notably the organization of production, of security, and of knowledge construction.

Global governance can indeed be defined, following Susan Strange (1986)[1], as the ways according to which the power to edict rules of behavior is organized between agents in various domains. We are looking here concretely at four domains: finance, security, organization of production, and the construction of knowledge. The contributions presented in this special issue aim to give preliminary assessments of the issues raised in each domain of the global governance. Their explorations have been used in a European project known as AUGUR, which looked at what might be the place of Europe in 2030 (see http://www.augurproject.eu) in light of the many shortcomings in global governance that the financial crisis has revealed.

Why did we focus our project on a time horizon of 2030? In the first place it was clear from 2008 onwards that a reconstruction of a new global governance, if ever realized, would take time. There is considerable inertia with regard to large international institutional changes, as evidenced by post-crisis financial re-regulation efforts such as the slow-motion implementation of Basel III or Dodd-Frank rules, not to mention the difficulties the EU has had in enacting a new regulatory architecture for finance and its needed banking union. In addition, this horizon was also imposed by the need to reduce strongly the levels of green-house gas emissions by 2050, all of which implied an ability to implement strong policy measures by 2030 at the latest (see Hourcade et al. in work package 5 in the AUGUR project web site mentioned previously). This meant that some adequate global governance schemes were rapidly required.

The AUGUR project was thus led to distinguish four gross scenarios of global governance with different abilities to check the degradation of our environment. The first scenario is one of little change where overall global governance is less and less effective and nation-states are increasingly unable to remedy the deficiencies of the global governance in the various fields. In the second scenario the two biggest global players are taking action to get out of the stale-mate, but do so mainly for their own benefits so that this new global governance may present important drawbacks as for its effects on environment. In the third scenario power is more balanced worldwide, with regional arrangements providing ways to strengthen the rules and respond to international challenges. The fourth scenario clearly acknowledges strong co-operation at the world level to get out of the stalemate and face some global challenges.

This is the overall broad context within which the contributions in this special FORESIGHT issue are looking at the major domains specifying the nature of a global governance scheme.

The first paper (Jean-Baptiste Gossé and Dominique Plihon "The future of financial markets and regulation: what strategy for Europe?") re-visits the reform of the financial sector and analyzes the kind of risks that had developed, with the aim of investigating how the power of finance could be controlled at an international level in order to see how we might get back some tamed finance. The second paper (Jean-Pierre Cling "The future of global trade and the WTO") looks at the regulation of international trade, an important aspect of the organization of production. The third paper (Rémi Barré "Innovation systems dynamics and the positioning of Europe. A review and critique of recent Foresight studies") considers access and diffusion of knowledge, which is a key element of competitiveness and therefore of the power of nations on the world scene. The fourth paper (V. Duwicquet, E.M. Mouhoud and J. Oudinet "International migration by 2030. Impact of immigration policies scenarios on growth and employment ") brings up another issue of rising importance for global governance, namely the mobility of workers. It has been much more restricted than the mobility of capital in today’s world, but pressures are mounting with the unequal levels of development across the world to turn it inevitably into a major factor of tension. The fifth paper (Andrew D. James and Thomas Teichler "Defence and security: new issues and impacts") focuses on the new types of conflicts and interventions that defence missions will be facing, stressing the congruence between these defence issues and the competitiveness of nations. Finally the sixth paper (Rémi Bazillier and Julien Vauday "CSR into (new) perspective") investigates the future of global governance from a totally different perspective, asking whether large internationalized firms could take over a significant part of the role of nations in the running of global affairs.

All these contributions pay special attention to the place of Europe in the creation of this global governance. Whether or not Europe will have its own say in global governance is obviously a key issue in the current crisis of the EU that followed the rise in public debt induced by the global financial crisis and its follow-up. Such a global-governance role for the EU clearly pre-supposes both an adequate level of improved competitiveness as well as the domestication of finance crucial for its autonomy. The papers stress the possibilities and the benefits that could be drawn from sound European policies. But they also leave open the prospect of a more detrimental outcome whereby the EU would split and leave each country alone to face the hazards of a disorderly market-led internationalization.

Robert Guttmann and Pascal Petit
Robert Guttmann is based at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, USA and University of Paris 13, Paris, France.Pascal Petit is Coordinator of the EU project AUGUR www.augurproject.eu, CNRS and at the Centre Economie de Paris Nord, University of Paris 13, Paris, France.

Notes

[1] Casino Capitalism Manchester University Press.