In sum, Rosenau defends a rather broad concept of global gover-

nance, which is nevertheless rooted in the tradition in which governance

has been introduced with regard to the study of domestic political sys-

tems. But why is such a concept necessary in the first place and how

does it improve our understanding of world politics? From an analytical

perspective, the concept of global governance describes a specific set of

observable and related phenomena. Using this new term can be under-

stood as an answer to the failures of existing theories of international re-

lations to account for the empirical transformations. As world politics is

rapidly changing, we have to adjust “our conceptual equipment to facil-

itate the analysis of how authority gets exercised in a decentralized

world.”21 In the words of another observer,

190 Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politics“Global governance” can be traced to a growing dissatisfaction among stu-

dents of international relations with the realist and liberal-institutionalist

theories that dominated the study of international organisation in the

1970s and 1980s. In particular, these failed to capture adequately the vast

increase, in both numbers and influence, of non-state actors and the

implications of technology in an age of globalisation.22

Thus, the term global governance can be seen as “a heuristic device

to capture and describe the confusing and seemingly ever-accelerating

transformation of the international system.”23 In other words, while the

very idea of “inter-national” relations is conceptually based on an “often

unquestioned preference for the nation state as the basic unit of analy-

sis,”24 the study of global governance acknowledges that a plethora of

forms of social organization and political decisionmaking exist that are

neither directed toward the state nor emanate from it. More precisely,

the concept of global governance departs from more traditional views

within the discipline in four important ways.

First, while the concept of international relations is by definition

primarily interested in “politics among nations”25 and pays rather little

attention to nonstate actors, the term global governance does not estab-

lish such a hierarchy. In contrast to most theorizing about international

relations, the notion of global governance attaches equal importance to

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations

(TNCs), and scientific actors. Thus, the Belgian government and Green-

peace are both considered actors within global governance. Next to civil

society and business, science has its role, too. Thus, the European Union

bases its trade restrictions on genetically modified organisms on scien-

tific arguments; the Codex Alimentarius of the United Nations Food and

Agriculture Organization (FAO) is informed by expert deliberations; and

the assessment reports of scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmen-

tal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have significant impact on inter-

national as well as national policies. Besides these rather well docu-

mented forces of world politics, more actors populate the universe of

global governance. Among them are supranational actors, such as the

European Commission; judicial actors, such as the Dispute Settlement

Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Crim-