Abstract

Although governance at the global level is certainly not new, the subject has become a central preoccupation in public policy and scholarly discourse over the past twenty-five years. Despite the growing interest, however, global governance remains a permissive concept. The frequency with which global governance is invoked in scholarly literature and policy practice far exceeds the number of times it is defined. As a result, the term is applied to a wide variety of different practices of order, regulation, systems of rule, and patterned regularity in the international arena. It is permissive in the sense that it gives one license to speak or write about many different things, from any pattern of order or deviation from anarchy (which also has multiple meanings) to normative preferences about how the world should be organized.