[E-rundbrief] Info 234 - N. Bullard: Governance and Deglobalisation

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 234 - Nicola Bullard (Focus on the Global South, 
Thailand): Governance: what needs to be governed and how might it be done? 
("Traditional institutions are suffering a deep crisis of legitimacy... 
'Deglobalization'... In a globalised world, where networks are increasingly 
the dominant organizational form, our 'instruments' for action are 
similarly delocalized, networked, without a centre and without hierarchies. 
They are people-driven rather that driven by organizational imperatives.")

Bad Ischl, 22.5.2005

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Governance: what needs to be governed and how might it be done?

Nicola Bullard
Focus on the Global South

In this short presentation, I would like to make some remarks on governance 
and what it means, and why we should be focusing on problems rather than 
institutions.

But first, I would like to make some comments on the introductory paper by 
Professor Sauer.

First, I disagree with the characterization of the "deglobalisers" as 
"flat-earthers". In fact, the idea of deglobalisation aims to make the 
world round again by proposing alternatives (with an "s") to the highly 
normative, linear and simplistic view of the world offered by the advocates 
of neoliberalism. "Deglobalisation" is a vision of the world that 
accentuates diversity, democracy, participation, human development and 
freedom.  "Deglobalisation" is not autarky, but rather an attempt to 
outline another globalization, or an  "altermondialisation", based on 
peoples economic and political sovereignty, and embedded with the values of 
solidarity and internationalism. It is a people-driven globalization, 
rather than a finance-driven globalization, and there is no doubt that a 
people driven globalization would be much more "round" than that shaped by 
finance.

Secondly, I agree only partly with the view that we "lack instruments". It 
depends, I suppose, on what you see as the "instruments". Traditional 
institutions such as political parties, trade unions, churches, 
international institutions and government itself are suffering a deep 
crisis of legitimacy, unable to break out of history, and unwilling or 
unable to act. However, there are billions of other "instruments" that are 
largely ignored by the powerful. By this I mean that people and society 
itself which are the real instruments of change. Of course, these forces 
need to be organised and channeled, and even in this respect I think that 
we are in a phase where new forums and processes are emerging which are 
giving shape to these energies. For example, the World Social Forum and all 
the processes which have grown up around it are powerful spaces for 
developing common perspectives and building common projects. In a 
globalised world, where networks are increasingly the dominant 
organizational form, our "instruments" for action are similarly 
delocalized, networked, without a centre and without hierarchies. They are 
people-driven rather that driven by organizational imperatives.

Third, and finally, I do not think we need a "blueprint" if this means a 
detailed plan of what to do. There is no single solution, there are only 
values that can guide us in choosing what to do: peoples' democracy, 
participation and sovereignty, human rights, freedom and justice. And, in 
so far as we need or can create a blueprint, it is in the foundations - a 
constitution of principles - rather than in a detailed expression of 
institutions, policies, programmes, etc. Here there is an analogy with the 
current debate over the proposed European constitution, whose critics argue 
that it is not a constitution but rather an assemblage of existing treaties 
and institutions, pulled together in an overarching logic which is bound in 
an historical process that embeds certain economic theories - such as the 
free market and the free movement of capital -- rather than providing a 
moral and ethical base from which society acts to create politics.

And now, to the question of governance.

Governance - especially the quest for "good" governance -- is one of the 
buzz words of the new century: George Bush uses it to justify US militarism 
and chauvinism, Gordon Brown uses it to attach strings to debt relief, and 
the World Bank uses it as the rhetorical camouflage for the failure of its 
economic ideology (that is, neo-liberal economics would work, if only Third 
World countries would practice "good" governance). At the end, whatever 
value the idea of "governance" may have had is rendered meaningless and 
treated with great suspicion. We are left with an empty bucket which can be 
filled with any kind of meaning, none of which has anything much to do with 
democracy.

Yet, for all the talk of governance there is very little critical 
examination of what is actually means: Is governance intrinsically "good" 
or do we always need to attach an adjective, such as weak, or bad or strong 
or good? What or who is being governed? Is governance leading or guiding, 
is it facilitating or regulating? Who is accountable to whom?  Is 
governance technocratic or political? What is its relationship to democracy?

In its present use, the rhetorical objective is to create something called 
"good governance". It is applied mainly to institutions, and is generally 
"technocratic" in character, that is, having the right rules, abiding by 
trade agreements, managing the financial system in a particular fashion and 
so on. This "technocratic" approach disguises the deeply political 
character of governance as it is invoked by the likes of George Bush and 
the World Bank. However, stripping away a few layers of the good governance 
onion we can see that the idea applies principally to the economic realm, 
and is often reduced to the simple demand for the "rule of law". But there 
are also limitations for whom this "rule of law" applies. At the risk of 
being seen as polemical, let me site the example of Iraq; the Coalition 
Provisional Authority - the administration of occupation under the 
leadership of Paul Bremer -- left 100 "orders" for the "governance" of 
Iraq. These included orders on issues such as intellectual property rights, 
the banking system, the rights of investors, taxation, capital controls, 
and so on. Indeed, the majority of the orders aim to establish a free 
market economic regime. This is a bizarre but telling example of how 
"governance" is seen as a way of making the world safe for capital rather 
than safe for people, and the belief that if the economic framework is 
"right" then the rest will follow (the unstated assumption being that the 
free market = freedom).  That is the measure of good governance is whether 
investors are well protected, rather than whether workers have the right to 
strike. In the neo-liberal view, "good" governance does not automatically 
include the right to strike, but it almost certainly implies the right to 
repatriate profits whenever you wish to do so. We need look no further than 
export processing zones for proof of both.

Those who invoke "good governance" are also megalomaniac in their belief 
that they have system-wide solutions that claim to resolve all the problems 
we confront in an integrated way. The World Bank, for example, has a mega 
vision of "development" that encompasses everything from poverty, gender, 
environment and participation to exchange rates, budget deficits, trade 
policy, government expenditure and the role of public services. Their 
"vision" springs from an economic ideology that does not work, after which 
they build layer after layer of rhetorical superstructure in an attempt to 
explain why it does not work, resorting, finally, to "good governance" as 
the missing ingredient of the neo-liberal recipe.  The World Bank and the 
IMF have a limitless capacity to insist that the failure of their economic 
policies lies elsewhere: for example, on the eve of the recent G7 finance 
ministers meeting in Washington, IMF director general Rodrigo Rato 
explained that "the question of debt requires a broader approach, and, in 
many cases, debt reduction may not be the best solution." Try telling that 
to the people who are paying the debt. The international institutions and 
the powerful governments display an intractable unwillingness to solve the 
problems, because solving the problems would expose the deep flaws in the 
neo-liberal ideology. And undermine their power

System-wide blueprints as proposed by George W. Bush and the World Bank are 
not the solution. We should stop talking about governance and institutions 
but we should act: and in the very "act" of acting, new processes will be 
generated. We should not wait until we have perfected the institutional 
framework for the future because this does not exist: the world is too 
complex for that, and in any case utopias all too often become dystopias: 
witness the gap between Hayek's fantasies and the reality of Argentina.

We need to look at the question differently. Rather than focusing on 
institutions, blueprints or even governance, which as we have seen 
consolidates certain policy orientations and power relations, we should 
start with a more practical approach by identifying problems that need to 
be solved.

A "problem" based approach has been tried before, but with quite different 
results. The Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions, is a clear example where powerful interests were able to block a 
successful outcome. The Kyoto process was negotiated in an 
intergovernmental framework where the agreements were continuously 
watered-down in an effort to keep the United States government at the 
table. As is well-know, the final text contained many concessions to the US 
and its industry lobbies, but even then the US still refused to sign. 
Consequently, we are left with the worst possible outcome: a weak 
agreement, which does not even include the world's largest producers of 
greenhouse gases. Similarly, the "Highly Indebted Poor Countries" 
Initiative (HIPC) announced during the G7 Summit in Cologne in 1999 has 
failed to deliver significant results in terms of debt cancellation because 
the implementing agency - the World Bank - continues to use debt as a tool 
to impose structural reforms and even "good governance" as preconditions 
for debt renegotiation. Thus, the economic policies which contribute to 
impoverishment by creating a cycle of dependence on foreign financing, 
either through exports or loans, are unchanged and the creditors stay in 
the driver's seat.

On the other hand, there have been some successes that could give us a 
useful model. The campaign to establish the International Treaty to Ban 
Landmines managed to avoid reproducing the power relations in the 
international system by deliberately adopting a different approach, which 
took into account the correlation of forces and avoided a classic 
multilateral negotiation. The campaign to launch an international treaty 
was initiated by a "coalition of the willing" which included civil society, 
some governments and UN agencies. Using an effective combination of mass 
campaigning and political work at the governmental and UN level, the 
international campaign was able to gain the support of the Canadian 
government which, in turn, took the initiative to host a meeting for the 
purpose of establishing an international treaty to ban landmines. The key 
to the campaign's success was that very different actors, working at many 
levels and in various institutional settings, were able to create an 
effective coalition to solve a pressing problem. Similarly, the campaign to 
establish the International Court of Justice was the result of like-minded 
but institutionally disconnected actors finding ways of working together to 
propose an answer to a major international concern. These campaigns have 
several common features: first, there is a strong moral legitimacy to the 
demands. Second they avoided the pitfalls of traditional inter-governmental 
negotiations by working "outside" the system. Finally, (and most 
importantly given the dominant position of the United States) they did not 
compromise the outcome to accommodate the interests of the US. To date, the 
US has refused to sign both treaties, nonetheless strong international law 
has been created which may eventually outlast this phase of US domination.

Perhaps we could consider applying a similar approach to some of the 
pressing problems we face -- such as debt, militarization, unemployment, 
the power of transnational corporations - by building coalitions with 
others - whether they be governments, various kinds of institutions, NGOs, 
social movements - who have a common interest to address problems in a way 
that avoids the limitations imposed by unequal power relations in the 
international and inter-governmental processes.

It is self-evident to say that in the globalised world, nation states are 
no longer the sole locus of power. Indeed in some countries they are one of 
the weakest sources of power. It is also self-evident that transnational 
corporations, financial markets, some extremely powerful countries, 
institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, are far more 
powerful - in global terms - than most governments in the South.

Therefore, we cannot work "through" these institutions because their own 
vested interests are too powerful, and the balance of power is firmly 
locked in place. However, by forming alliances based on the willingness to 
act and a minimal shared vision, there might be scope to skirt around the 
institutionalized power and emerge at the other end with something 
worthwhile. We have to " flow" and gather our forces, rather than crash 
against the rocks of power. For even rocks will succumb to water, in the end.

What might be the basis of unity of such potentially diverse actors? What, 
for example, would unite the WHO, people living with AIDS, peasant farmers, 
environmentalists, some governments, international lawyers in a common 
political project to get the TRIPS agreement out of the WTO, and ban the 
patenting of life.

The existing human rights conventions provide a minimal frame to hold 
together these coalitions, and to provide the basis for a "problem" 
oriented approach to governance as opposed to an institution-lead approach 
to governance. We don't need to have a system-wide solution, not least 
because this would kill such an approach before it even could get off the 
ground.

Berlin, 16 April 2005
Nicola Bullard <n.bullard at FOCUSWEB.ORG>

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Matthias Reichl

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