Democratic Globalization and Network Governance

It's interesting to note that while everyone is busy doing his or her job, working for a company or dining, wining and partying, people in international politics are tinkering as to what values should define our international order. I personally do not worry about stuff like that but among global elites, it seems to me that what they have in mind pertains to the question on how to rule the world. This question is the very title of a recently published book by Mark Engler. According to him, there are two (2) schools of thought on the debate namely the Clinton-era vision of a corporate-controlled global economy(based on the neoliberalism of the Chicago boys) and the infamous Bush-era of imperial globalization which is characterized by US military dominance. Engler believes that neither will be sustainable as global problems still prevail or even worsen and that an alternative is emerging in favor of globalization from the ground up which he calls democratic globalization. According to Egler, this entails,

"...allowing local citizens to have a voice in shaping the economic policies that affect their communities; removing the straitjacket of the Washington Consensus and allowing diverse approaches to development to flurish; restructuring or replacing international financial institutions with bodies that have truly democratic representation; and crafting laws to protect the rights of people and the environment rather than merely the rights of capital. "

While the idea of democratic globalization may be sound, the devil I believe lies on how to actually manage such complexity from below. This issue resonates to what Jean-François Rischard suggested in his book High-Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. From someone who has helped shape the direction of the World Bank in his capacity as Vice-President for Europe, Rischard drives the message across when he said, "we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past". The author suggests the concept of network governance to address our global problems. What I like about it is the fact that his conceptual solution does not pretend to be all inclusive and he does acknowledge that it lacks the necessary implementation details. What he is trying to envision is kind of an institution for global governance with an inherent character of an extra-government bodies devoted to each problem area, a kind of institution which will be supported by governments. Each problem area is then composed of what he calls "global issues networks"(GIN) which will manage the necessary compliance of established standards. It is the same GIN that would also pinpoint nations and organizations that were not co-operating.

In one way or another, I think that the world is going to what Rischard foresees. In the academe, the network theory seems to be a hot item. Likewise, through the internet, we have become part of various networks and open systems. And in the real world, various organizations both in the public and private sectors and even within the civil society have been working on various global issues or problems that have been identified. The missing link amidst all these multifarious efforts, I believe, is the coordinated mechanism. Network Governance as posited by Rischard or democratic kind of globalization as suggested by Engler.

Just as the Standard Model of particle physics is an unfinished poem as physicists try to come up with a unified theory, national and global leaders, policy makers and economic pundits are likewise at the stage of unifying all the force-mediating lines and stanzas together into a single acceptable framework!