Conference Rationale
Topics, challenges, and goals of the conference
Overview
Globalization is transforming markets, institutions, societies, politics and identity. Telecommunication and transportation networks are expanding, thickening and becoming denser. Trafficking over these networks—goods and services, digital data, people, money, disease, ideas—is growing and accelerating. Globalization makes it feel as if time and space were compressed. Trans-boundary social networks and institutions are on the rise, eroding conventional boundaries that once bracketed polities, politics, societies, cultures, and economies. The dynamics of globalization are converting products, ideas, political systems, markets, identities, values and culture into ecumenical commodities, while at the same time spurring a reaction to protect local preferences, rituals, identities, markets, industries, and ideals. These rapid changes are presenting unprecedented governance challenges.
The rapid pace of globalization is creating pressing global challenges. These challenges compel us to take a fresh look at the forms, tools and legitimacy of our current approaches to global governance and reinvent new ones. Conventional approaches to global governance are becoming more obsolete, less responsive. In recognition of the growing inadequacy of convention global governance approaches, newly emergent forms of global governance have sprung up, involving NGOs, corporations, civil society and other non-state entities. Trans-boundary organizations are taking a larger role in governance, while states and international organizations retain their authority. In some cases these emergent forms of global governance are agents for states, sometimes substitutes for failed states, or sometimes emerge in opposition to state actions. International organizations have increasingly included non-state entities into their deliberations, sometimes forming alliances, but sometimes spawning opposition.
The conference Challenge of Globalization: Reinventing Good Global Governance will examine urgent global challenges created by globalization and make recommendations for better approaches to good global governance that meet these challenges. The conference focuses on three broad topics:
- Security and Development
- Global Health
- Trade and Investment
For each of these topics the conference will focus on the following questions:
- In each area what are the new challenges facing the world today?
- How well are global governance approaches dealing with these challenges?
- Where are the gaps between what we are doing and what we are achieving?
- What changes should we make now to achieve better global governance?
Security and Development, Global Health and Disease & Trade and Investment are all areas where globalization is creating new challenges requiring new innovative and effective global governance. Globalization is compelling us to construct new policy narratives that capture the real complexities and interdependencies in these areas and invent global governance approaches that are responsive. A conference goal is to promote discussions that consider these issues from a global perspective and recognizes the interdependencies shared among these three areas.
In a world of complex globalization challenges, how do we design appropriately complex global governance responses?
The recommendations made at this conference will be published and distributed to help policy makers better understand how globalization is changing our world and what approaches will lead to good global governance.
