Acceso usuarios
Anna Caffarena
Some years ago, in the often-cited article What Is Global Governance?, Lawrence S. Finkelstein argued that "we say "governance" because we don�t really know what to call what is going on" 1. More than ten years later, Klaus Dingwerth and Philipp Pattberg 2 reached a rather similar conclusion, noting that "in contemporary academic debate about world politics, "global governance" is all over the place» and it is so because "almost any process or structure of politics beyond the state -regardless of scope, content, or context- has within the last few years been declared part of a general idea of global governance". If this is the reason behind its success, the label global governance can be said to have been used conveniently to set the reflection on the management of supra- and trans-national issues 3 within the supposed flux of change occurring in the political sphere, while avoiding the daunting task of addressing the nature and consequences of change in its own right. Not surprisingly Dingwerth and Pattberg underline that "most of the works on global governance stop short of pondering why they are using the newly coined term -rather than, say, more old-fashioned terms such as international organization or international politics- and what is implied by their use" 4. Instead of trying to make sense of what was going on in the political sphere -supposedly as an effect of globalization-, scholars and practitioners alike took a shortcut: gave it a name and moved forward to consider those which could be conceived as practical instances of governance itself, the expectation being apparently that the full picture will eventually come out and prove more tractable.
