Inal Court (icc); intergovernmental organizations, such as the World

Bank or the large number of convention secretariats; hybrid and private

organizations, such as the World Conservation Union or Forest Steward-

ship Council (FSC); and, finally, a number of other institutions such as

the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) or the mass media, which are less

easily subsumed under one of the above categories. In essence, global

governance implies a multiactor perspective on world politics.

Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg 191Second, while the term international relations suggests that inter-

national interaction can be analyzed separately from interaction at other

levels of social interaction, the term global governance conceives of

world politics as a multilevel system in which local, national, regional,

and global political processes are inseparably linked. Global governance

research is therefore particularly interested in the interlinkages between

the different policy levels. It includes asking how WTO rules affect

communities in different regions, and how communities in different

regions affect WTO rules. It includes asking how ideas expressed in

transnational forums affect and are affected by ideas and practices in

national, regional, or local settings. And it includes asking how solu-

tions to global problems can be found without neglecting the differen-

tiated needs and capabilities of highly distinct local communities. The

benefit of including these questions in the notion of global governance

derives from the importance these linkages have in real life. Under-

standing how the “world political system”26 works implies under-

standing how different spaces and levels of the system interact.

Third, while the concept of international relations is traditionally

linked to power relations, interest-based interstate bargaining, and, more

recently, the role of norms and advocacy networks as the driving forces

of politics beyond the state, the notion of global governance starts from

the assumption that a wide variety of forms of governance exist next to

each other and that a hierarchy among these various mechanisms is

hard, if not impossible, to discern:

There is no single organizing principle on which global governance

rests, no emergent order around which communities and nations are

likely to converge. Global governance is the sum of myriad—literally

millions of—control mechanisms driven by different histories, goals,

structures, and processes. . . . In terms of governance, the world is too

disaggregated for grand logics that postulate a measure of global

coherence.27

Examples of such mechanisms include the procedures of the UN

Security Council governing the use of force laid out in Chapter VII of

the Charter of the United Nations, the processes by which transnational

social movements aim at persuading or pressuring governments to im-

prove their human rights records, the joint environmental standard set-

ting of business corporations and NGOs to promote sustainability, and

transboundary alliances of cities and regions intended to foster mutual

learning. The concept of governance captures this plurality of mecha-

nisms that horizontally link activities of various actors. In a domestic

context, governance refers to horizontal processes of self-coordination—

192 Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politicsfor instance, in issue networks, advocacy coalitions, or similar mecha-

nisms—that alter the relation between public and private interests.

Transferred to the international and transnational policy level, where

central authority is largely absent, governance accordingly encompasses

intergovernmental negotiations as well as other, less formal processes of

coordination among a number of public and private actors.

Fourth, while research in the field of international relations tends to

focus on the phenomenon of authority and its legitimation primarily in

close connection with the state’s ability to pursue its rational self-

interest, a global governance perspective allows capturing the emergence

of new spheres of authority in world politics independently of sovereign

nation-states.28 A growing number of authors have pointed to the emer-

gence of private authority as a result of new steering mechanisms that dif-

fer from hierarchical domestic decisionmaking or nonhierarchical inter-

state bargaining.29 For Doris Fuchs, “the core of the global governance

argument concerns the acquisition of authoritative decision-making

capacity by non-state and supra-state actors.”30 Examples of such new

authority include private interfirm regimes that regulate whole market

segments; private standard-setting cooperations between different soci-

etal actors; transnational advocacy networks that exercise moral author-