Networked Planetary Governance

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Interview

Anne Slaughter is interview by the Bergruen Institute:

* Jonathan Blake: One of the themes in your work is the disconnect between sovereignty, which is held exclusively by national governments, and the actual work of governing, which is often done by many different actors working at multiple scales. Can we reconcile the gulf between the theory — nation-state sovereignty — and the practice, where governance comes from all sorts of institutions?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: It’s not good enough to do what we’ve always done, which is to treat the state as a black box. We have to find ways to recognize the different parts of states — to think and act in terms of horizontal disaggregation (among departments or ministries) as well as vertical disaggregation (cities, provinces, etc.). Legitimate, recognized status is important for the system to function — international organizations need legal status to be able to participate formally in global institutions and conclude agreements as official actors on the world stage.

What we need to do now is to enable official action at more levels. For example, we could formally recognize the role of sub-national actors. It’s telling that the Paris Agreement included the category of “non-party stakeholders.” Some of these were billionaires and foundations, but a lot of them were sub-state actors, like governors and mayors. That matters because when President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the agreement in 2017, California Governor Gavin Newsom and the mayors in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, as well as a number of CEOs and foundations heads, stepped in and committed to continue working toward the agreement’s goals.


* Nils Gilman: At a practical, legal level, what kinds of institutional work needs to be done to achieve that?

Slaughter: We must be able to work in a networked way as well as in a hierarchical way. You have to be able to identify the different actors who are going to be in your network. Consider, for example, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a committee of central bank governors, or the International Organization of Securities Commissions. These groups have no formal legal status but are crucial for generating norms and developing ties among central bank officials.

We need both function and legitimacy. Institutions have to be functional — they have to deliver the goods — but they also have to be seen as legitimate. Every time I give a talk on my vision of world governance, someone says something like, “Bill and Melinda Gates are just as important as the U.N. secretary-general!” What they mean is that both the Gates Foundation and the U.N. serve an important function — they both deliver the goods — and as a result have some form of “output legitimacy.”

At the same time, it’s important for subnational governmental actors and international organizations to have a formal legitimacy gained via legal recognition by national governments. States are the best representatives of large communities of people, and given norms of popular sovereignty, they remain the best vehicles for providing legitimacy. So on the one hand, we have to be able to solve problems through transnational and nongovernmental networks, but on the other hand, we cannot deny the status of states, which remain crucial nodes in the network."


* Gilman: You published “A New World Order” 17 years ago, arguing that we already have a far-reaching global governance system, just not the one that people typically think we have. This system is made up of global networks of government officials coordinating and cooperating to tackle all sorts of shared problems, from transnational crime to constitutional jurisprudence to regulating financial markets. What’s your assessment of how these networks have fared in the years since the book came out? Do we need new ones to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Slaughter: There are definitely new ones. In the financial arena, for example, the Financial Stability Board — which emerged out of the global networks of insurance supervisors, securities regulators, finance ministers and central bankers — was essential during the 2008 financial crisis. We would not have gotten through the crisis without it.

What I left out of the book were cities. I knew they were there and I gestured at them. But since then, cities have become far more important. On terrorism, health, climate, equity and inequality, we can’t only work at the national level. City governments have a huge role to play.


* Blake: Yet nation-states remain institutionally oriented toward other nation-states and towards the formal intergovernmental fora, like the U.N. How much of a barrier is this to achieving a fully networked world?

Slaughter: Much of this is due to the formation of officials’ professional identities: what they studied, what they’ve done in their careers. The pathway for diplomats is to go into government or maybe into an international organization. This shapes how people see the world: as a world of states, which is definitely how the State Department sees it.

There’s also a divide in the issues that people learn about. Diplomats study war and peace and global commons issues, like freedom of the seas. But you have no training to help you think about vaccines, and certainly not treatments and isolation and all the things that we need to do during a pandemic. Similarly, when you get into the nitty-gritty of climate change — and the behavioral change we have to accomplish in almost every aspect of the way we live, produce and consume — we have to work far below the level of national governments and foreign policy practitioners. Something like the Paris Agreement is important, but only a beginning at best.

By contrast, folks working in city governments often do have the necessary knowledge and experience. I tell my students if I could choose between Nina Hachigian’s job — Los Angeles deputy mayor of international affairs — versus being a midlevel official in the State Department, I’d take Nina’s in a heartbeat, because she’s really at the cutting edge.

This also means that we need to rethink security outside the state-centric framework that we are used to. Governments with nuclear weapons still have the capacity to destroy the planet, but that threat is not what affects most people in their everyday lives. Health and climate are the paradigms for security in this century, in the same way that world wars were the paradigms for the 20th century.

What’s key is to get people away from thinking strictly in terms of “international,” which connotes government-to-government interaction and state versus non-state, and instead to think in terms of the interconnected global. Our kids are much more keyed into thinking that way. Psychologically, my generation (I’m 62) started out with separation, and then figured out connection; by contrast, recent generations start connected. The idea of an interconnected ecosystem comes naturally to them because they were connected from the beginning. Not all connections are good, of course, so they also have to figure out separation and boundaries."

(https://www.noemamag.com/networked-planetary-governance/)

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