Global Governance : Reconstructing a Contested Social

Global Governance has become a buzzword in the social sciences in general and in International Relations (IR) in particular. Many different phenomena, from the influence of civil society on international decision-making processes to the role of intergovernmental organisations and transnational corporations in world politics, are invoked as examples of global governance. However, upon closer inspection, there seems to be no commonly accepted definition of the concept and therefore disagreement about its nature puts severe limits to theory building. Consequently, this paper attempts to reconstruct global governance as a useful scientific concept for the assessment of large-scale transformations at the European and global level. I proceed in three analytical steps: first, I discuss the conceptual confusion generated by the different understandings of both 'global' and 'governance'. Subsequently, I give a brief overview of the academic ideas that constitute the basis on which the current global governance research agenda is erected. The following section analyses three current and often contradictory uses of the term 'global governance'. First, an analytical version that evokes global governance as an integrative term that captures many current transformations in world politics; second, a normative version that uses global governance to denote a political project towards greater multilateralism and international cooperation; and finally, a third version that analyses the current global governance debate as a hegemonic discourse. Subsequently, I propose a definition of global governance based on a triangular understanding of the concept as reflecting structure, process and outcome. The concluding section summarises the main findings and highlights the proposed definition of global governance as a useful social science concept.