The Global is an academic blog managed by the Graduate Institute’s Global Governance Centre. It promotes critical reflection on, and constructive and well-informed engagement with the actors, norms and processes of global governance.
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Studying Governance through Participatory Theatre and Sketch-Making: Dialogical Research with Organized Working Children
By Nadine Benedix – How can we explore the diverse relational engagements of children and youth in global governance processes? Looking specifically at participatory action research methods, Nadine Benedix advances a dialogical approach that emphasizes the collaborative dimension of research in practice. Drawing on experiences with organizations of working children in Senegal, she shows how dialogical contextualization can open up avenues for different knowledge generation practices such as participatory theater performances.
Back from the Bonn Climate Change Conference. Can we still oppose science and equity?
In this blog, Kari De Pryck reflects on the Bonn Climate Change Conference organized in June 2023. While these intersessional meetings are less known than the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), they constitute essential sites for the preparatory technical work of the COPs. With discussions about the implementation of the Paris Agreement becoming increasingly politicized, this year’s talks were particularly interesting to take the pulse of the negotiations for the next COP in Dubai (COP28). Disagreements about the conclusions provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were especially tense, revealing the growing divide between Parties over the need to consider equity when implementing climate action.
Infrastructural Clashes: Induced Scarcity and Governing Refugees through Depletion
By Martina Tazzioli – Asylum seekers stranded in refugee camps in Greece are exposed to multiple infrastructural breakdowns that contribute to the depletion of their lives. In this piece, Martina Tazzioli introduces the concept of “infrastructural clashes” to highlight the apparent clash between high-tech control systems, on the one hand, and, on the other, the failures and scarcity of basic infrastructures in camps – such as electricity, running water, and food. Infrastructural clashes are analyzed not as side effects but rather as constitutive components of modes of governing by debilitating refugees.
Epistemic Orders and Global Governance
By Christian Bueger and Annabelle Littoz-Monnet – The authors argue to take note of the fundamental re-organization of knowledge production for global governance. Developing the concept of epistemic orders, they show how epistemic foundations have transformed in three waves. While wave 1 centered on the state, and wave 2 on international organization, wave 3 stands for the centrality of proprietary knowledge production by companies and their foundations. The authors argue that moving to such a macroscopic understanding helps us grasp why and how the problems of global governance come to be identified, delineated, and acted upon.
Lone Wolves, Mobilizers, and Organizers: How Members Matter for Advocacy
By Nina Hall – Digital advocacy organizations like MoveOn in the United States and Campact in Germany are experts at rapid response mobilizing their millions of members. However, there are limits to a mass-mobilizing model. Here I build on my recent book, Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era, alongside the works of Wendy Wong, Hahrie Han, Margaret Levi, and John Ahlquist, to examine how advocacy organizations can use their members to exercise influence.