Definition of Global Governance

The Commission on Global Governance (1995) defines governance as the sum of many ways individuals and
institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. According to Kennette Benedic (2015) Global
governance is a purposeful order that emerges from institutions, processes, norms, formal agreements, and informal
mechanism that regulate action for a common good.

Global governance is the way in which global affairs are managed today. Thakur and Weiss define global
governance as “the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate relations
between citizens, societies, markets, and states in the international system.

Ideally, global governance will assist in helping to solve challenges within the international system. This global
governance normally involves a variety of factors including states and regional and international organizations. One
organization may technically give the central role on an issue, like the World Trade Organization (WTO) in world
trade affairs.

Thus, Global governance is understood “as international process of consensus-forming which generates guidelines
and agreements that affect national governments and international corporations. Examples of consensus would
include WHO policies on health issues. Institutions of global governance also include the United Nations (UN),
International Criminal Court (ICC), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World bank (WB).

Contemporary Global Governance

The term governance stands for formal political institutions that coordinate and control interdependent social
relations and also impose decisions. In the contemporary world governance has been used to mean the regulation of
interdependent relations in the absence of all-embracing political authority, such as in the international system.

Therefore Contemporary global governance can be depicted as the summary of laws, policies, regulations, norms,
and institutions that define, establish, and mediate transborder relations among states, cultures, citizens,
intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the market.

The Contemporary global governance has the following features (Biermann and Pattberg. 2008):

a. the emergence of new types of agency and of actors in addition to national governments;
b. the emergence of new mechanism and institutions of global governance that go beyond traditional forms of
state-led, treaty-based regimes; and
c. increasing segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional
spheres.
Governance

- the sum of many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. (The
Commission on Global Governance)

Global Governance

- a purposeful order that emerges from institutions, processes, norms, formal agreements, and informal
mechanism that regulate action for a common good. (Kennette Benedic)
- as “the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate relations between
citizens, societies, markets, and states in the international system. (Thakur and Weiss)
- is understood “as international process of consensus-forming which generates guidelines and agreements
that affect national governments and international corporations

Contemporary Global Governance

- can be depicted as the summary of laws, policies, regulations, norms, and institutions that define, establish,
and mediate transborder relations among states, cultures, citizens, intergovernmental and nongovernmental
organizations, and the market.

Features (Biermann and Pattberg. 2008):

a. the emergence of new types of agency and of actors in addition to national governments;
b. the emergence of new mechanism and institutions of global governance that go beyond traditional
forms of state-led, treaty-based regimes; and
c. increasing segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and
functional spheres.