Looking forward: incremental change or transformation?

Farer, Tom

IN OUR INAUGURAL ESSAY, TIM SISK AND I DECLARED OUR INTENTION TO FOSter exploration of the ways in which social goods--like wealth, power, security, authority, food, water, and knowledge--are continuously distributed or maldistributed through cooperation and competition among influential actors--public, nonprofit, and private (including illicit associations)--within a constantly evolving normative framework, an increasingly stressed natural environment, and stunning technological change. Coincidentally, we hoped to illuminate the reasons why the extant system of governance so inadequately addresses the great threats to human flourishing from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to climate change, slaughter of the helpless, and destitution. The question we asked ourselves was: What format would best serve our ends?

Editors, like other human beings, are to a degree path dependent. We accepted our structural legacy, but tweaked it in part by increasing the number of special issues and sections and beginning the normalization of longer review essays. Perhaps we departed modestly from some of our predecessors by convening scholars and practitioners around issues and events that we deemed particularly salient in terms of our larger aims.

An early example was the symposium that I organized on the controversial Goldstone Report. I had two immediate goals. One was to promote clarification through discourse of the constraints that human rights and humanitarian law impose on the parties to asymmetric conflicts whether occurring within a single territorial authority or across international boundaries. Another was to strengthen the precedent for relatively rapid scholarly assessment of important UN reports and thereby to sharpen fact-finding and analytical standards for UN inquiries. After all, an important element of effective global governance is a systemic capacity for fact-finding and assessment that will be widely perceived as authoritative.

A second product of our efforts to organize collective inquiry was the special issue on the multilateral diplomacy of states moving rapidly higher in the league tables of geo-economic and geostrategic influence, specifically Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries) which we followed up with a similar piece on Turkey. Had time allowed, we would have commissioned additional pieces at a minimum on Indonesia and Nigeria or South Africa. Yet a third illustration of our attempt to convene scholars in order to address a critical governance issue are the two articles on the governance of transnational river systems that appeared in the previous issue.

One of my disappointments as coeditor was my inability to find a scholar willing and able to lead an assessment of measures taken by nations with relatively effective governments to mitigate the impact of global market forces on sectors of the national population most vulnerable to rapid changes in comparative advantage. I saw it as an effort to identify best practices in helping not only the destitute, but also members of the middle and working classes who in middle age find themselves economically redundant. Probably for youth unemployment we would have needed a separate, albeit related, study of best practices.

These days even relatively successful states have diminished fiscal resources for protecting the welfare of their citizens. Among the principal drains on their potential revenues is the transnational illicit economy through which vast untaxed streams of income pass like a great river in spate. Private financial institutions are an integral part of the illicit as well as the licit economy and are, therefore, a prominent feature of global governance.

Individually and collectively, national governments and intergovernmental organizations have attempted to harness these financial institutions in an effort to reduce the siphoning of potential public revenues as well as to curtail the power of terrorist organizations and cartels dealing in illicit goods (including drugs, guns, and undocumented migrants). Yet at the same time, the acts and omissions of governments allow private financial institutions to continue servicing the illicit as well as the licit economy. This morbid public-private relationship is another target of opportunity for Global Governance, one we did not have the time and space to pursue. I would like to have convened a group of scholars, practitioners, and journalists to illuminate the motives of public sector actors who have willfully failed to facilitate if not actually hindered a much more forceful collective multilateral effort to make private financial institutions help governments appropriate at least a portion of the illicit stream of income.

In order to play the convening role I have suggested that the journal probably needs a somewhat larger editorial board, although once the editors find a project leader, he or she can assume the supervisory and coordinating activities that such large projects require in addition to greater financial resources. The latter might be obtainable from foundations, private individuals, or governments once the journal is able to demonstrate its commitment and capacity to launch large-scale, policy-oriented inquiries and to publish and disseminate them expeditiously.

To move in that direction means something more like transformation than incremental change in the journal's format. After all these projects would crowd out most of the individual, often more narrowly focused, articles that have been the journal's staple fare. It follows, moreover, there would be little space for unsolicited manuscripts, thus diminishing the outlets for younger scholars trying to make their reputation. But that concern could be mitigated if project directors would, with the journal's assistance, announce the project's research and analytical needs and consider unsolicited proposals to participate. Each project could have a blog so that persons interested in contributing could send short essays to the blog that would help the project director and a core of preselected colleagues assess the relative ability of declared aspirants.

My personal belief is that transformation along the lines proposed would make the journal an even more useful vehicle for enhancing global governance.

Note

Tom Farer, dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies from 1996 to 2010, is university professor at the University of Denver and a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and Human Rights Quarterly.