Description
The literature on Global Governance has transcended the traditional fields of International Relations and Global Political Economy by giving legitimacy to non-state actors and fora as sites of power, politics, and practice in governing global issues. Specifically, Global Governance acknowledges markets, civil society, international organizations and various national and transnational actors and interests as shaping global governance and accepts norms, ideas, discourses and knowledge as important factors in shaping global governance. In this way, it has moved beyond the assumptions that rational- and self- interests alone are what motivate decisions. However, the Global Governance literature, much like its disciplinary predecessors, focuses primarily on how the world is ordered, and less on the processes through which governance is established and how change happens, particularly for developing a more equitable and sustainable global political economy. This paper juxtaposes development in practice and the roles of civil society and social movement actors in this process with the global governance and global political economy theories to develop an analytical framework to better understand how different actors, initiatives, and governance mechanisms contribute to generating genuine sustainable and equitable development. It draws on a range of historic and contemporary theorists who consider how change happens, with an emphasis on Albert O. Hirschman’s idea of possibilism to consider how dynamic and iterative processes can contribute to transformational change. This lens is in now way a blueprint of how change happens, but rather provides one way in which scholars might begin parsing out the processes that results in governance outcomes that generate outcomes that contest existing structures in the global economy.
