How did the individual human being become the focus of the contemporary
discourse on security? What was the role of the United Nations in
securing the individual? What are the payoffs and costs of ...this
extension of the concept? Neil MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong tackle these
questions by analyzing historical and contemporary debates about what is to be
secured. From Westphalia through the 19th century, the state's claim to be the
object of security was sustainable because it offered its subjects some measure of
protection. The state's ability to provide security for its citizens came under
heavy strain in the 20th century as a result of technological, strategic, and
ideological innovations. By the end of World War II, efforts to reclaim the security
rights of individuals gathered pace, as seen in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and a host of United Nations covenants and conventions. MacFarlane and Khong
highlight the UN's work in promoting human security ideas since the 1940s, giving
special emphasis to its role in extending the notion of security to include
development, economic, environmental, and other issues in the 1990s.
Despite a growing interest in critical social and political studies of climate change, the field remains fragmented and diffuse. This is the first volume to collect this body of scholarship, ...providing a key reference point in the growing debate about climate change across the social sciences. The book provides a new set of insights into the ways in which climate change is creating new forms of social order, and the ways in which they are structured through the workings of rationality, power and politics. Governing the Climate is invaluable for three main audiences: social science researchers and advanced students in the field of climate change; the wider research community interested in global environmental politics and global environmental governance; and policy makers and researchers concerned more broadly with environmental politics at international, national and local levels.
In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers ...science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. InThe Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of "Spaceship Earth"-the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system-exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions.Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the "global"-as in global population, global climate, and global economy-an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO's Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.
The New Global Rulers Büthe, Tim; Mattli, Walter
2011., 20110228, 2011, 2011-02-28, 20110101, c2011
eBook
Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule making has been ...motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. The New Global Rulers examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses--and why.
Global public goods (GPGs)--the economic term for a broad range of goods and services that benefit everyone, including stable climate, public health, and economic security--pose notable governance ...challenges. At the national level, public goods are often provided by government, but at the global level there is no established state-like entity to take charge of their provision. The complex nature of many GPGs poses additional problems of coordination, knowledge generation and the formation of citizen preferences. This book considers traditional public economy theory of public goods provision as oversimplified, because it is state centered and fiscally focused. It develops a multidisciplinary look at the challenges of understanding and designing appropriate governance regimes for different types of goods in such areas as the environment, food security, and development assistance. The chapter authors, all leading scholars in the field, explore the misalignment between existing GPG policies and actors’ incentives and understandings. They analyze the complex impact of incentives, the involvement of stakeholders in collective decision making, and the specific coordination needed for the generation of knowledge. The book shows that governance of GPGs must be democratic, reflexive--emphasizing collective learning processes--and knowledge based in order to be effective.
The global governance of climate change is in flux. Conventional strategies of addressing climate change through universal, interstate negotiations--the most prominent of which is the Kyoto ...Protocol--have been stymied by the gaps that exist between the negotiating powers of states, rendering such initiatives stagnant and ineffectual. In response, a number of new actors and processes have begun to challenge the traditionally exclusive authority of nation-states to create rules and manage environmental problems via multi-national treaties. Dozens of innovative climate response initiatives, or "governance experiments," have emerged at multiple levels of politics and across multiple jurisdictions: individuals, cities, states/provinces, corporations, and even new multilateral initiatives. Climate Governance at the Crossroads explains how and why these new governance experiments have emerged, drawing upon a database of such initiatives to ascertain how these initiatives fit together and how they influence what is defined as environmental governance. In assessing the relational impact of these initiatives (whether they complement each other or clash; whether they can be scaled up or down; and whether they can be expanded beyond their current jurisdictional and geographic boundaries), Matthew Hoffmann provides insight into whether this experimentation is likely to result in an effective response to climate change. Additionally, he draws broader conclusions about how we understand global governance, addressing questions of how we understand authority and what we accept as modes of rule-making in global political spaces. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/9780195390087/toc.html
Experts investigate how states and other actors can improve inter-institutional synergy and examine the complexity of overlapping environmental governance structures.
This book continues to serve as the leading comprehensive overview of global emergency management. This edition provides practitioners and students alike with a comprehensive understanding of the ...disaster management profession by utilizing a global perspective and including the different sources of risk and vulnerability, the systems that exist to manage hazard risk, and the many different stakeholders involved. This update examines the impact of many recent large-scale and catastrophic disaster events on countries and communities, as well as their influence on disaster risk reduction efforts worldwide. It also expands coverage of small-island developing states (SIDS) and explores the achievements of the United Nations Hyogo Framework for Action (2005-2015) and the priorities for action in the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction currently under development.
Financial instability threatens the global economy. The volatility of capital movements across national borders has led many observers to argue for a reformed "global financial architecture," a body ...of consistent rules and institutions to prevent financial crises. Yet regulators have a decidedly mixed record in their attempts to create global standards for the financial system. David Andrew Singer seeks to explain the varying pressures on regulatory agencies to negotiate internationally acceptable rules and suggests that the variation is largely traceable to the different domestic political pressures faced by regulators.
InRegulating Capital, Singer provides both a theory of the effects of domestic pressures on international regulation and a detailed analysis of regulators' attempts at international rulemaking in banking, securities, and insurance. Singer addresses the complexities of global finance in an accessible style, and he does not turn away from the more dramatic aspects of globalization; he makes clear the international implications of bank failures and stock-market crashes, the rise of derivatives, and the catastrophic financial losses caused by Hurricane Katrina and the events of September 11.
