Does the System Work? Transnational Crises and the Resilience of Global Governance

This event is organised by Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law.

In recent decades, global governance has faced significant transnational crises characterized by threat, urgency, and uncertainty, from the Global Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, heterogeneous infra-state, public–private, and private governance institutions have proliferated alongside incumbent inter-state institutions. As a result, contemporary global governance takes place through institutional configurations called Hybrid Institutional Complexes (HICs). How effectively can HICs respond to the stresses of transnational crises? Drawing on the concept of resilience, we prepare the conceptual and theoretical ground for analyzing the crisis responses of HICs-based governance. To that end, we first identify three dimensions along which the resilience of governance arrangements must be assessed. We then derive two theoretical conjectures as to the conditions under which a HIC will be (more or less) resilient. The first, institutional diversity, is structural; the second, the presence of intellectual and entrepreneurial leaders and bricoleurs, is agentic. To probe the analytical utility of our approach, we assess the performance of the global finance HIC in response to the Global Financial Crisis and compare the performance of the global health HIC in responding to COVID-19.

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Does the System Work? Transnational Crises and the Resilience of Global Governance (pdf)

About the Speaker
Dr Benjamin Faude is Lecturer in International Relations. Before joining Glasgow, he worked at Newcastle University, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He also held visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley and at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Moreover, Dr Faude taught at the University of Bamberg, at Free University Berlin, and at Charles University in Prague. He holds a PhD from the University of Bamberg (Germany). His most recent publication is "The Institutional Dynamics of Global Governance in Hard Times: Innovation or Decline?" (co-authored with John Karlsrud).

Image credit: Freepik
 

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