Global Governance as a Perspective on World Politics

Abstract

In one of the first issues of Global Governance, Larry Finkelstein observed that "'Global Governance' appears to be virtually anything." A decade later, the concept of global governance has become ever more popular-and confusion about its meaning ever greater. While we do think that some flexibility in the use of concepts is both theoretically desirable and practically unavoidable, we believe that the current disarray is a hindrance to more fruitful discussions and to the goal of developing more coherent theories of global governance. We therefore argue that a more careful use of the term global governance is necessary to overcome the current confusion spawned by the variation in uses of the concept. After clarifying the basic function of concepts in social science and reviewing the different uses of global governance in the current literature, we use the term as an analytical concept that provides a perspective on world politics different from the more traditional notion of "international relations."