9 GOLD MERCURY INTERNATIONAL Global Governance: Towards a New Ethic
Unsustainable global governance practices: absolute power corrupts absolutely For now, as much as global governance is touted as a participatory and cosmopolitan reality, the international community has not yet risen to the challenge of protecting global public goods and fully promoting sustainability. Examples of unsustainable governing practices abound and the reasons are not a lack of will—they are deeply political. Part of this is that the world is experiencing a failure of global governance. The West found its financial regulatory system fatally flawed in the face of an economic crisis; the UN Copenhagen (dubbed ‘Hopenhagen’) summit on climate change showed how much political in-fighting could set back the sustainable governance agenda. Yet even before the financial crisis, there were deep underlying structural, political, and moral cracks in the old foundations of global governance. It might help to outline the main political criticisms directed at the global governance system today, as a starting point for how we might develop our behaviour accordingly and help shape a more sustainable system. We will see that problems with the institutional order are linked to problems with the global power order.