Global Governance and the United Nations

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1,3, University of Münster (Institut für Politikwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Globalisation and Global Governance, language: English, abstract: [...] Clearly, the paper revolves around the normative concept of global governance. While

in scientific literature, the normative concept of global governance has become

unfashionable by the time and a rather critical analysis of the implication of

international regulation has taken precedence, it will be outlined that there is good

reason to investigate the connection between the UN and the normative concept. By no

means does this foreclose the importance of critical scrutiny of the establishing

governance architecture. The criticism of global governance as the perpetuation of

neoliberal hegemony and Western domination is acknowledged but will not be dealt

with from this point on. Surprisingly little effort been made so far to systematically link the concept of global

governance, be it normative or analytical, to the United Nations system although on a

gut level, scholars seem to agree that both are somehow linked. At the start of the

analysis, this paper sets out to present a first useful framework put forth by Brühl and

Rosert (Brühl/Rosert 2007) and adds a missing category to the analysis, the link

between the UN and the normative concept of global governance. In the normative

tradition, the developed framework inter alia proposes to consider the UN as a potential

activator for global governance as a normative concept. While the connection of global

governance and the UN as its activator offers room for gripping research, the ambition

of this paper is much downgraded. It only seeks to offer a starting point by investigating

whether the UN can actually advance global governance and tries to enable a first

cautious approach to the more general hypothesis above. To facilitate this analysis, in a first step a major problem of global governance is

selected. The fundamental lack of integration of non-state actors into governance

structures serves as a case in point for that matter. The legitimacy of global governance

suffers from this lack which in turn impedes reaping the desired benefits of the concept.

In a second step, the UN¿s capacity to solve the depicted problem is analysed. [...]