This is the second volume to commemorate the 90th birthday of the distinguished scholar Chadwick F. Alger to honor his lifetime achievement in international relations and as President of the International Studies Association (1978-1979). After a brief introduction by Chad F. Alger this volume presents six of his key texts on The UN System and Cities in Global Governance, focusing on “Cities as arenas for participatory learning in global citizenship”; “The Impact of Cities on International Systems”; “Perceiving, Analysing and Coping With the Local-Global Nexus”; “The World Relations of Cities: Closing the Gap Between Social Science Paradigms and Everyday Human Experience”; “Japanese Municipal International Exchange and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific: Opportunities and Challenges” and on “Searching for Democratic Potential in Emerging Global Governance: What Are the Implications of Regional and Global Involvements of Local Governments?”.

In the 21st century, the world is faced with threats of global scale that cannot be confronted without collective action. Although global government as such does not exist, formal and informal institutions, practices, and initiatives—together forming "global governance"—bring a greater measure of predictability, stability, and order to trans-border issues than might be expected. Yet, there are significant gaps between many current global problems and available solutions. Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur analyze the UN's role in addressing such knowledge, normative, policy, institutional, and compliance lapses. The UN's relationship to these five global governance gaps is explored through case studies of some of the most burning problems of our age, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian crises, development aid, climate change, human rights, and HIV/AIDS.

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

This volume investigates the changing nature of cities in the international system, and their increasing prominence in global governance and global order.

In a rapidly urbanizing and globalized world, cities have been the epicentres of COVID-19 (coronavirus). The virus has spread to virtually all parts of the world; first, among globally connected cities, then through community transmission and from the city to the countryside. This report shows that the intrinsic value of sustainable urbanization can and should be harnessed for the wellbeing of all. It provides evidence and policy analysis of the value of urbanization from an economic, social and environmental perspective. It also explores the role of innovation and technology, local governments, targeted investments and the effective implementation of the New Urban Agenda in fostering the value of sustainable urbanization.

The current international system of institutions and governance groups is proving inadequate to meet many of today's most important challenges, such as terrorism, poverty, nuclear proliferation, financial integration, and climate change. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and UN were founded after World War II, and their structures of voting power and representation have become obsolete, no longer reflecting today's balance of economic and political power. This insightful book examines how to make such institutions more responsive and effective. Institutional reform is critically needed but currently in stalemate. A new push is needed from powerful nations acting together through a reformed and enlarged G-8 that includes emerging economies, such as China and India. Global challenges demand integrated approaches, with greater coordination among international institutions. Global Governance Reform argues that without reconstituting the Group of 8 summit into a larger, more representative group of leaders, with a new mandate to provide strategic guidance to the system of international institutions, the world will fall further behind in addressing global challenges. The path to global reform is defined by the need to act in coordinated ways on summit and institutional reform, and this book lights the way.

While the view that only states act as global actors is conventional, significant diplomatic and cross-cultural activity is taking place in cities today. Economic growth and fiscal experiments all occur in urban contexts. Political reforms, social innovation, and protests and revolutions generate in cities. Criminal activities, terrorist actions, counterinsurgency, missile attacks (indeed, atomic bombs), and wars are centered in big cities. They are sources of global pollution as well as of environmental transformations such as urban gardening. Knowledge production, big data collection, and tech innovation all spur from intense interaction in cities. They are the meeting points between different cultures, religions, and identities. These increasingly international cities develop twinning networks and projects, share information, sign cooperation agreements, contribute to the drafting of national and international policies, provide development aid, promote assistance to refugees, and do territorial marketing through decentralized city-city or district-district cooperation. Cities do what “municipalities” used to do many centuries ago: they cooperate but also enter into intense competitive dynamics. To understand current sociopolitical dynamics on a planetary level, we need to have two mental maps in mind: the state-centered map and the nonstate centered map. We must take into account the existence of a complex diplomatic regime based on different overlapping levels—the urban and the state.

This book draws on the expertise of faculty and colleagues at the Balsillie School of International Affairs to both locate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a contribution to the development of global government and to examine the political-institutional and financial challenges posed by the SDGs. The contributors are experts in global governance issues in a broad variety of fields ranging from health, food systems, social policy, migration and climate change. An introductory chapter sets out the broad context of the governance challenges involved, and how individual chapters contribute to the analysis. The book begins by focusing on individual SDGs, examining briefly the background to the particular goal and evaluating the opportunities and challenges (particularly governance challenges) in achieving the goal, as well as discussing how this goal relates to other SDGs. The book goes on to address the broader issues of achieving the set of goals overall, examining the novel financing mechanisms required for an enterprise of this nature, the trade-offs involved (particularly between the urgent climate agenda and the social/economic goals), the institutional arrangements designed to enable the achievement of the goals and offering a critical perspective on the enterprise as a whole. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals makes a distinctive contribution by covering a broad range of individual goals with contributions from experts on governance in the global climate, social and economic areas as well as providing assessments of the overall project – its financial feasibility, institutional requisites, and its failures to tackle certain problems at the core. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of international affairs, development studies and sustainable development, as well as those engaged in policymaking nationally, internationally and those working in NGOs.

The Committee for Development Policy is a subsidiary body of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It provides inputs and independent advice to the Council on emerging cross-sectoral development issues and on international cooperation for development, focusing on medium- and long-term aspects. The Committee is also responsible for reviewing the status of least developed countries (tLDCs) and for monitoring their progress after graduation from the category.

The report presents findings from the 2018 revision of World Urbanization Prospects, which contains the latest estimates of the urban and rural populations or areas from 1950 to 2018 and projections to 2050, as well as estimates of population size from 1950 to 2018 and projections to 2030 for all urban agglomerations with 300,000 inhabitants or more in 2018. The world urban population is at an all-time high, and the share of urban dwellers, is projected to represent two thirds of the global population in 2050. Continued urbanization will bring new opportunities and challenges for sustainable development.