Theorizing global governance

This chapter takes stock of three generations of global governance scholarship. A first generation of scholars reacted to the empirically observed world political transformation in the 1990s by developing a new vocabulary that allowed scholars and practitioners to make sense of a world that was emerging in front of their eyes. Work in the spirit of this first generation was mainly conceptual (not explanatory), focused on systems (not elements), adopted a multi- centric (not state-centric) view, did not prioritize formal over informal structures, and was primarily interested in dynamic (not static) accounts of global governance. This changed with a second generation of global governance scholars that put more emphasis on explaining observed variations in global governance in a parsimonious manner. More recently, however, we also identify a third generation of theorizing global governance in the making. By embracing complexity and non-linearity as the underlying ontology of global governance and by moving from individual institutions to larger systems of global governance, the work of this third generation connects more directly to the early conceptual attempts to make sense of global governance. How global governance scholarship will develop from here is difficult to predict. But the ongoing turbulences in the world political system suggest that global governance is here to stay as a valuable perspective.