Conceptualising global social governance

different principles and have blurred and overlapping mandates and differential degrees of power. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank are briefly compared to illustrate these differences. The chapter then turns to world-regional social governance, and considers the range of sub-global (worldregional) IGOs and the challenges they both face and present for global social governance. Finally, the chapter looks at the future of global social governance and reflects on contemporary challenges to GSP.

Conceptualising global social governance

Governance is a tricky concept, with a variety of definitions. It can be distinguished from government in that it concerns various means of regulating or organising some activity or entity that may involve governments but that are not limited to them. Governance is sometimes thought of as referring to the environment in which governments act. Fidler (2005, p 162) provides a concise definition of governance as ‘The process of governing, or of controlling, managing or regulating the affairs of some entity’. Note that this may include formal institutions that involve codified rules and norms as well as tacit or informal rules or norms. It may also include various types of political, economic or social actors and organisations – both state and non-state. As we will see, a multiplicity of institutions and actors is involved in the making of GSP, and they operate according to a range of rules and norms.

Since there is no world government, the concept of global governance is central to understanding the nature of GSP. We can make a distinction between global governance and what is strictly speaking international governance, although some authors use these terms interchangeably. Fidler (2005, p 162) defines international governance as ‘The process of governing the relations between states that involves only the states as legitimate actors’. Although states, via their governments, may engage in bilateral relationships, we are most concerned with their multilateral relationships (namely those that involve many states). Multilateral relationships have been institutionalised to a large extent via IGOs, most of which were created towards the end of the Second World War. IGOs can be thought of as both institutions, in that they involve sets of formal rules through which governments relate to each other, and as actors in their own right, since they are also organisations that have some level of autonomy from the governments that created them. IGOs are organised in a variety of ways, but what most have in common is that cooperation between national states via their governments is at their heart.

In contrast to international governance, we can define global governance as, ‘Governance among states (including intergovernmental organisations) and non-state actors’ (Fidler, 2005, p 161), with the latter including international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), transnational corporations

(TNCs) and other entities. It is this mix of states, IGOs, civil society and private actors, engaged in complex processes of influencing, decision-making and administration, that we refer to as global governance. The social policy aspects of this, global social governance, comprise the governance mechanisms through which GSP is produced, contested and implemented.

The role and influence of non-state actors varies. There are several avenues of involvement through the formal mechanisms of global governance that are managed through the IGOs; for example, IGOs increasingly encourage corporations to become involved in the development and implementation of GSPs through multistakeholder partnerships (see Chapter 11, this volume), most commonly public–private partnerships (PPPs) (see Chapters 11, 13 and 14, this volume). INGOs are also sometimes afforded observer status at international negotiations that are overseen by IGOs, and they often work with IGOs and states to deliver social policies, particularly in developing countries. Non-state actors also develop their own mechanisms of global governance through the use of private regulation. This occurs when TNCs, keen to avoid formal, mandated oversight of their activities by states or IGOS, cooperate with their competitors to develop their own voluntary rules and regulations to regulate an industry. In addition to these corporate codes of conduct, international codes of practice set out rules and norms governing the actions of private actors. Yeates and Pillinger (2019) draw attention to the importance of such codes in respect of international health workforce recruitment. O’Brien et al (2000) characterise the resulting form of global governance as complex multilateralism. This conveys how the role of states remains central, especially via IGOs, but the formal avenues of cooperation through this multilateral system are complemented by complex modes of interaction with (and among) non-state actors.

While IGOs at the global level are important, governance mechanisms are multitiered, and operate across different levels or scales. This is encapsulated within the concept of multilevel governance (see Box 2.1). Five ‘layers’ of political and administrative decision-making can be identified:

• Global, comprising the complex multilateral system. • World-regional, whereby states cooperate in geographical areas, such as the

European Union (EU). • National, managed by governments. • Sub-national, such as the devolved governments in the UK, or the federal system adopted by several countries. • Local, comprising small districts overseen by local governments or councils.