Global Governance

Abstract

Global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF have played a central role in the evolution and consolidation of shifts in the post-1945 world order. As we argued in Chapters 2 and 3, these institutions have influenced key turning points in politico-economic processes in the South. Social movements such as those involved in the World Social Forum process (Chapter 8) increasingly contest the role of these institutions in the South and the world economy. Further, in the last two decades, there has been a growing debate in the fields of IR and IPE concerning the nature and modalities of contemporary global governance institutional complex. From the cosmopolitan tradition, theorists of cosmopolitan democracy consider the promotion of democracy at the global level as central to the reconfiguration of global governance arrangements along democratic lines. According to Anthony McGrew, in the context of contemporary globalization, ‘the realization of substantive, as opposed to simply procedural, democracy—that is, a polity cultivating the active citizen as opposed to the passive voter—demands the extension of democracy beyond the nation-state to bring to account those global and transnational forces which presently escape effective democratic control’ (1997: 232). For David Held (1995: 99) the political and economic developments that have emerged in the contemporary phase of globalization, calls for the need to extend democratic political practices beyond the territorial boundary of nation-states.