A rich analysis of the increasingly important engagement between international institutions and global social movements.

Contesting Global Order traces dominant values and patterns on a world level over the last half century. Including a framing introduction written for the volume, this book presents James H. Mittelman’s most influential essays. It offers cross-regional analysis, drawing on his fieldwork in nine countries in Africa and Asia. This research explores mechanisms by which prevailing knowledge about global order is implicated in its deep tensions: chiefly, the impetus for development and global governance embodies aspirations for attaining wellbeing and upholding human dignity; yet market- and state-driven globalization embraces basic ideas inscribed in power, thus increasing vulnerability and making the world more insecure. Rather than exalt one element in this quandary over another, Mittelman shows how different aspects of the relationship collide. Examining cases of specific localities, international organizations, and social movements, this grounded study unveils evolving structures that shape our times. It projects scenarios for future global order and how to make it work for the have-nots. Mittelman consistently forges a critical perspective throughout this collection. His reflections cut against conventions in international studies and, more generally, global order. This volume will be of great interest to all students and practitioners of development, global governance, and globalization.

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy's importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume: to develop an agenda for systematic and comparative research on legitimacy in global governance. In complementary fashion, the chapters address different aspects of the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy? The volume makes four specific contributions. First, it argues for a sociological approach to legitimacy, centered on perceptions of legitimate global governance among affected audiences. Second, it moves beyond the traditional focus on states as the principal audience for legitimacy in global governance and considers a full spectrum of actors from governments to citizens. Third, it advocates a comparative approach to the study of legitimacy in global governance, and suggests strategies for comparison across institutions, issue areas, countries, societal groups, and time. Fourth, the volume offers the most comprehensive treatment so far of the sociological legitimacy of global governance, covering three broad analytical themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

The scale, effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance lag far behind the world's needs. This path-breaking book examines how far civil society involvement provides an answer to these problems. Does civil society make global governance more democratic? Have citizen action groups raised the accountability of global bodies that deal with challenges such as climate change, financial crises, conflict, disease and inequality? What circumstances have promoted (or blocked) civil society efforts to make global governance institutions more democratically accountable? What could improve these outcomes in the future? The authors base their argument on studies of thirteen global institutions, including the UN, G8, WTO, ICANN and IMF. Specialists from around the world critically assess what has and has not worked in efforts to make global bodies answer to publics as well as states. Combining intellectual depth and political relevance, Building Global Democracy? will appeal to students, researchers, activists and policymakers.

The UN is able to recognize key global challenges, but beset by difficulties in trying to resolve them. In this, it represents the current global political balance, but is also the only international institution that could move it forward. Civil society can be a catalyst for this kind of change. In this book, Nora McKeon provides a comprehensive analysis of UN engagement with civil society. The book pays particular attention to food and agriculture, which now lie at the heart of global governance issues. McKeon shows that politically meaningful space for civil society can be introduced into UN policy dialogue. The United Nations and Civil Society also makes the case that it is only by engaging with organizations which legitimately speak for the 'poor' targeted by the Millennium Development Goals that the UN can promote equitable, sustainable development and build global democracy from the ground up. This book has strong ramifications for global governance, civil society and the contemporary debate over the future of food.

This book presents a historically situated explanation of the rise of global water governance and the contemporary challenges that global water governance seeks to address. It is particularly concerned with connecting what are often technical issues in water management with the social and political structures that affect how technical and scientific advice affects decisions. Schmidt and Matthews are careful to avoid the pitfalls of setting up opposing binaries, such as ‘nature versus culture’ or ‘private versus public’, thereby allowing readers to understand how contests over water governance have been shaped over time and why they will continue to be so. Co-written by an academic and a practitioner, Global Challenges in Water Governance combines the dual concerns for both analytical clarity and practical applicability in a way that is particularly valuable both for educators, researchers, decision-makers, and newcomers to the complexities of water use decisions.

Illustrated with case studies from across the globe, Contesting Human Rights provides an innovative approach to human rights, and examines the barriers and changing pathways to the full realisation of these rights. Presenting a thorough proposal for the reframing of human rights, the volume suggests that new opportunities at, and below, the state level, and creative pathways of global governance can help reconstruct human rights in the face of modern challenges.

Power Shifts and Global Governance: Challenges from South and North' presents an eclectic theoretical framework for emerging architectures of global governance through examining country and regional case studies from the perspective of 'great power shifts' in the twenty-first century. The book analytically and empirically explores the role of global civil society, discusses the implications of the rise of India and China, analyses regional security issues in Latin America and the Middle East and develops proposals for possible summit and UN reforms.

Few authors have sought to explain the links among development, global governance, and globalization, Contesting Global Order traces dominant values and patterns on a world level over the last half century. Including a framing introduction written for the volume, this book brings together for the first time James H. Mittelman’s most influential works, offering cross-regional analysis, and including fieldwork in nine countries in Africa and Asia.