September 1, 2022 • 17 mins
Who governs the world, and how? Learn about international organisations like the United Nations, World Bank, G20. Find out about multi-stakeholder networks and how badly they dealt with COVID through COVAX. Grasp the problems of ISDS. See how undemocratic our world is!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
We hear a lot today about ‘global governance’.
It sounds reassuring,
like the world is somehow being governedeven though there is no global government.
But what does contemporary global governance actually look like?
How is our world being governed,and by whom?
And moreover, is this form of governance good?Or effective? Or just? Or democratic?
(00:33):
The current system of global governanceis very messy and complicated,
if it can be considered to be a system at all.
It is more like a hodge-podge collection of different organisations, networks and committees
that operate on different bases and which overlap and often contradict each other.
Broadly speaking, there are threedifferent types of global governance arrangements:
(00:56):
state-centred, multi-stakeholder, and private.And we're going to look at all three in turn.
Let’s start with state-centred.
This is the most well-known form of global governance.
It consists of various international organisations, or clubs,
where governments come together to negotiate and make decisions.
(01:17):
The United Nations is the key example here.
Almost all of the governments of theworld’s states have a seat in the General Assembly
and in the various other committees and councils which carry out the UN’s work.
This is also arguably the most democraticof all the global governance arrangements,
because each member state has one vote.
(01:38):
So in theory at least, richer and poorer countries have the same power.
In practice, of course, rich and powerful states have all sorts of waysto persuade poorer and weaker states to vote in particular ways.
But at least there's a theoretical equality there.
But even if the UN is the most democratic of the international organisations,
(01:58):
that is sadly not saying much,because it is not really very democratic at all.
First of all the ‘one state, one vote’ formula ignores the fact that states vary hugely in terms of their population.
The small island state of Tuvaluhas a population of around 12,000 people,
while India has a population of over 1.4 billion people,
(02:22):
and yet both countries have the same one vote,which doesn’t really seem right.
One idea is to have a system of weighted voting,according to the number of people per country.
Perhaps that would be more democratic and more appropriate?
Even more problematic is the fact that individual citizensdo not have any say at the UN, only their governments do.
(02:44):
And in many cases governments don’t really represent the wishes of their citizens.
So while the UN Charter talks of ‘We the peoples…’, really it should say ‘We the governments…’
Having a second chamber, like a parliament, which directly represented world citizens,
in parallel to the General Assemblywhich represents country governments,
(03:05):
would make the UN far more democratic and connected to the people.
Bad as the UN may be,other international organisations are even less democratic.
Let's take the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF,
two organisations that play a really important role in global economic matters.
In these organisations again only governments are represented,
(03:29):
but this time it is not ‘one state, one vote’,
but rather votes are apportioned according tothe amount of money the country contributes to the organisation.
So, it is more like ‘one dollar, one vote’.
The result is that these international organisationsare completely dominated by the rich and powerful countries.
The US, UK, France, Germany and Japan combined control over 35% of the votes.
(03:56):
And the US alone has 15.88% of the votes,
a very significant number because major decisions require an 85% majority,
and therefore the US effectively has a veto on these decisions.
So perhaps it is not surprising that these organisations give loans to poor countries
(04:16):
and then add on all sorts of strings and conditionalities
that in effect mean that in many cases it is actually the World Bank or the IMF
that are effectively dictating the economic policy of these countries.
And of course, they dictate policies that benefit the rich countries
and tend to cause increasing poverty and inequality in the countries that receive the loans.
(04:40):
Going even further down the democracy ladder we come to ‘clubs’ of governments.
These are arrangements of a relatively small numberof governments who come together in a rather ad-hoc way,
without an official organisation, to make decisions on global affairs.
A key example here would be the G20,
(05:00):
in which leaders of 20 powerful countries meet togetherin summits to make decisions which effect the whole world.
Or the G7, in which it is leaders of just 7 countries.
Who chose those countries?
Who gave them power to make decisions for the rest of the world?
Why don’t other countries get a say?
And who even knows what they really discuss behind closed doors?
(05:23):
The whole arrangement is deeply secretive and deeply undemocratic,
and leads to global policies which favour the richer countriesand go against the interests of the poorer ones.
Another form of state-centred global governanceare what are called ‘trans-governmental networks’.
These are issue-specific networks
(05:44):
where particular government agencies from different countriesshare information or work together in a fairly loose network form.
There are dozens and dozens of these networksand they carry out very important elements of global governance,
but most people have never even heard of them.
In most cases their members are only or predominantly from the richer countries
(06:06):
and across the board they are highly secretive,
with decisions taken behind closed doors and rarely made open to the public.
Many of them operate in the economic and financial sectors,
such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision,
the Financial Stability Board,
and the International Competition Network.
Do you feel comfortable with the fact that secretive unelected and unaccountable officials
(06:29):
are quietly making policies on issuessuch as banking, and finance and competition,
and many, many other matters, that effect all of us?
So much for state-centred global governance. It didn't look that great.
Some parts are more democratic than others,but overall it is highly secretive and highly undemocratic.
(06:50):
Is the situation any better when we look atthe second form of global governance arrangement,
namely multi-stakeholder networks?
Unfortunately the situation is even worse.
In state-centred arrangements the key actorsare ministers and government officials,
who at least in some countries have beendemocratically elected by the citizens of their countries.
So they have some rightto claim that they represent the people.
(07:14):
But in multi-stakeholder networks there aremany different kinds of actors or ‘stakeholders’.
So alongside government officials,you will generally find NGOs , Trans-National Corporations,
and other business representativestaking part in the discussions and indeed voting on the decisions.
Why is this bad?
Well, if we look at it from the point of view of democracy,
(07:37):
we have to ask, ‘who elected these people?Who do they represent?’
With NGOs, no-one elected them.
And it is very hard to see who they represent.Their financial donors? Their activist supporters? Not clear.
While many NGOs do fantastic work andindeed try to make the world more fair and more just,
(07:58):
it just does not make sense from a democratic point of view
that they should be making decisions on our behalf,rather than elected representatives.
With Trans-National Corporationsand business organisations it is even worse.
Who do they represent?
Here the answer at least is clear.They represent their shareholders
(08:18):
and they are duty-bound to stand up for their interests and to make as much profit as possible for them.
That's their role.
So how can such people possibly be tasked with making decisions for the whole of society?
They are, by definition, legally boundto think about what is best for their shareholders,
(08:39):
a generally small group of wealthy elites,rather than what is best for society as a whole.
And furthermore, they have huge budgets to attend meetingswith large teams of lawyers and large teams of consultants
and can easily outweigh the smaller teamsof people from the NGOs, and even from the states.
(08:59):
So in many cases, multi-stakeholder networksend up being a thinly-veiled form of corporate rule,
with business representativesmaking decisions which benefit their shareholders,
while claiming that they are doingwhat is good for society in general.
In the past few years there has, unfortunately, been a trend towards more and more ‘stakeholder governance’,
(09:21):
and it is making global governance even more un-democratic.
There are now dozens and dozens of multi-stakeholder networks,
such as the World Commission on Dams,
the Alliance for Water Stewardship,
or the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization,otherwise known as GAVI,
where states, companies and NGOs try to come together to solve problems.
(09:42):
But despite the fancy logos and the upbeat press releases,
these networks have not really solved any of these problems,
but have instead instituted market-oriented ‘solutions’
which somehow just happen to make their member companies richer,
while having little or no impact on the intended problem.
Let's look at GAVI as an example,the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.
(10:07):
You’d think they would have been rushing to waive patent rightsand to quickly get the world vaccinated against COVID-19, wouldn’t you?
Well, instead of doing that they created COVAX,
short for ‘COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility’,
along with the World Health Organisationand two other multi-stakeholder networks
the Vaccines Alliance
(10:28):
and CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
So what does COVAX do?
COVAX pools together money from richer governments
and gives it to big pharmaceutical companiesto help them develop COVID vaccines.
The idea is that this will speed up the development of new vaccines
and enable them to be quickly manufactured on a big scale.
(10:50):
COVAX is also supposed to help distribute vaccines to poorer countries,
by supplying enough vaccines to vaccinate 20% of their population.
So basically COVAX gives public moneyto private corporations to develop vaccines.
It then allows these corporations to sell the vaccines back to the governments
(11:10):
at whatever market price they can negotiate.
So that the the governments essentially pay for them twice.
And after that it facilitates the distributionof a woefully small number of vaccines to poorer countries.
Isn’t this simply an embarrassment?
An example of what kind of system gets established when private companies are in the driving seat?
(11:32):
If we really wanted to distribute COVID vaccinesquickly and equitably round the world
and avert the huge global crisis which we are currently in,
we would have firstly made the companies sell their vaccines at cost price, or perhaps with a very small profit.
Secondly, we would ensure that patents are waived,at least during the pandemic crisis,
(11:54):
and that knowledge and skills about how to manufacture the vaccines
are actively transferred to as many countries and companies as possible.
That way global production could bemassively ramped up, and of course, prices kept down.
By doing this, far more people would have access to COVID vaccines far more quickly,
and the pandemic would be ended much more rapidly for everyone.
(12:16):
But then the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t have made such big profits.
Today their directors and shareholders have made billions.
And this is precisely the problem of lettingprivate companies get involved in global governance
under the guise of ‘multi-stakeholder governance’.
It leads to benefits for these companies,and woefully inadequate solutions for the rest of society.
(12:39):
Now you might think that it can’t get any worse. But unfortunately it can.
A third type of global governance arrangement that is growing rapidly, is private governance,
governance arrangements that are openly run by private companies,
without being dressed up as being multi-stakeholder arrangements or anything else.
(13:00):
You may have heard of SWIFT,the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication,
and you may have used it when you transferred money from your country to another country.
It has developed technical standardsand coding systems for banks all over the world.
But did you know that it is a private corporation?Privately owned by some 2,500 banks?
(13:24):
And did you realise that it is developing these standards and guidelines
independently from any national and intergovernmental regulation?
So what we have with a system in which the banksmake their own rules without any governmental oversight?
And after all the banking crashes of the past few years,
do we think nothing can go wrong?
(13:47):
Another example of private global governance is ICANN,
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names.
This is a private non-profit organisation which manages the centralized domain name system, the DNS,
to control the routing for the vast majority of global Internet traffic.
With the huge and ever-growing power of the internet,does it make sense to have it governed by a private corporation?
(14:14):
Wouldn’t it be better if there was state-based oversight and regulation,
by democratically elected global representatives?
Even more worrying is the growing systemof privately run global courts and arbitration tribunals
that is beginning to form the mainenforcement mechanisms for trans-border business relations,
both between companies,and between companies and states.
(14:37):
You see, as more and more companiesare doing business across state borders,
they have realised that they needsome form of global enforcerment mechanism
to ensure that they and their partners keep their agreements.
And in contrast to the area of human rights law,that I discussed in another video,
these companies do not accept somewishy-washy voluntary system of ‘recommendations’.
(15:01):
They want a system of binding international business lawthat is backed up by global courts.
But rather than have a state-based system of global courts,
where we can ensure that judges are chosen fairlyand that democratically created law is applied appropriately,
what has happened is the creation of a number of private tribunals,
(15:21):
with judges overwhelmingly from the private sector,
making decisions behind closed doors,and very often favouring private companies over states.
Futhermore, there has to be something very wrongwith our overall global governance system
if we allow companies to set up privateglobal courts and tribunals to enforce business law,
but we say it is impossible, or unfeasible,to set up global courts to enforce human rights law.
(15:47):
Why the difference?
Why does business law have more power than human rights law?
Could it be because companies are increasingly taking part in global governance,
making the decisions and setting up the systems?
Is this the type of global governance that we, the people of the world, want?
(16:07):
Wouldn’t it be far, far better to have a global democracy?
So that we can have a say in whatstructures and laws are made at the global level?
Wouldn’t that allow us to build a much better system of global governance,
or even global government,
in which the rules and laws empower us, the people,and not just the elites and the corporations?
We hear a lot today about ‘global governance’.
It sounds reassuring,
like the world is somehow being governedeven though there is no global government.
But what does contemporary global governance actually look like?
How is our world being governed,and by whom?
And moreover, is this form of governance good?Or effective? Or just? Or democratic?
(00:33):
The current system of global governanceis very messy and complicated,
if it can be considered to be a system at all.
It is more like a hodge-podge collection of different organisations, networks and committees
that operate on different bases and which overlap and often contradict each other.
Broadly speaking, there are threedifferent types of global governance arrangements:
(00:56):
state-centred, multi-stakeholder, and private.And we're going to look at all three in turn.
Let’s start with state-centred.
This is the most well-known form of global governance.
It consists of various international organisations, or clubs,
where governments come together to negotiate and make decisions.
(01:17):
The United Nations is the key example here.
Almost all of the governments of theworld’s states have a seat in the General Assembly
and in the various other committees and councils which carry out the UN’s work.
This is also arguably the most democraticof all the global governance arrangements,
because each member state has one vote.
(01:38):
So in theory at least, richer and poorer countries have the same power.
In practice, of course, rich and powerful states have all sorts of waysto persuade poorer and weaker states to vote in particular ways.
But at least there's a theoretical equality there.
But even if the UN is the most democratic of the international organisations,
(01:58):
that is sadly not saying much,because it is not really very democratic at all.
First of all the ‘one state, one vote’ formula ignores the fact that states vary hugely in terms of their population.
The small island state of Tuvaluhas a population of around 12,000 people,
while India has a population of over 1.4 billion people,
(02:22):
and yet both countries have the same one vote,which doesn’t really seem right.
One idea is to have a system of weighted voting,according to the number of people per country.
Perhaps that would be more democratic and more appropriate?
Even more problematic is the fact that individual citizensdo not have any say at the UN, only their governments do.
(02:44):
And in many cases governments don’t really represent the wishes of their citizens.
So while the UN Charter talks of ‘We the peoples…’, really it should say ‘We the governments…’
Having a second chamber, like a parliament, which directly represented world citizens,
in parallel to the General Assemblywhich represents country governments,
(03:05):
would make the UN far more democratic and connected to the people.
Bad as the UN may be,other international organisations are even less democratic.
Let's take the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF,
two organisations that play a really important role in global economic matters.
In these organisations again only governments are represented,
(03:29):
but this time it is not ‘one state, one vote’,
but rather votes are apportioned according tothe amount of money the country contributes to the organisation.
So, it is more like ‘one dollar, one vote’.
The result is that these international organisationsare completely dominated by the rich and powerful countries.
The US, UK, France, Germany and Japan combined control over 35% of the votes.
(03:56):
And the US alone has 15.88% of the votes,
a very significant number because major decisions require an 85% majority,
and therefore the US effectively has a veto on these decisions.
So perhaps it is not surprising that these organisations give loans to poor countries
(04:16):
and then add on all sorts of strings and conditionalities
that in effect mean that in many cases it is actually the World Bank or the IMF
that are effectively dictating the economic policy of these countries.
And of course, they dictate policies that benefit the rich countries
and tend to cause increasing poverty and inequality in the countries that receive the loans.
(04:40):
Going even further down the democracy ladder we come to ‘clubs’ of governments.
These are arrangements of a relatively small numberof governments who come together in a rather ad-hoc way,
without an official organisation, to make decisions on global affairs.
A key example here would be the G20,
(05:00):
in which leaders of 20 powerful countries meet togetherin summits to make decisions which effect the whole world.
Or the G7, in which it is leaders of just 7 countries.
Who chose those countries?
Who gave them power to make decisions for the rest of the world?
Why don’t other countries get a say?
And who even knows what they really discuss behind closed doors?
(05:23):
The whole arrangement is deeply secretive and deeply undemocratic,
and leads to global policies which favour the richer countriesand go against the interests of the poorer ones.
Another form of state-centred global governanceare what are called ‘trans-governmental networks’.
These are issue-specific networks
(05:44):
where particular government agencies from different countriesshare information or work together in a fairly loose network form.
There are dozens and dozens of these networksand they carry out very important elements of global governance,
but most people have never even heard of them.
In most cases their members are only or predominantly from the richer countries
(06:06):
and across the board they are highly secretive,
with decisions taken behind closed doors and rarely made open to the public.
Many of them operate in the economic and financial sectors,
such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision,
the Financial Stability Board,
and the International Competition Network.
Do you feel comfortable with the fact that secretive unelected and unaccountable officials
(06:29):
are quietly making policies on issuessuch as banking, and finance and competition,
and many, many other matters, that effect all of us?
So much for state-centred global governance. It didn't look that great.
Some parts are more democratic than others,but overall it is highly secretive and highly undemocratic.
(06:50):
Is the situation any better when we look atthe second form of global governance arrangement,
namely multi-stakeholder networks?
Unfortunately the situation is even worse.
In state-centred arrangements the key actorsare ministers and government officials,
who at least in some countries have beendemocratically elected by the citizens of their countries.
So they have some rightto claim that they represent the people.
(07:14):
But in multi-stakeholder networks there aremany different kinds of actors or ‘stakeholders’.
So alongside government officials,you will generally find NGOs , Trans-National Corporations,
and other business representativestaking part in the discussions and indeed voting on the decisions.
Why is this bad?
Well, if we look at it from the point of view of democracy,
(07:37):
we have to ask, ‘who elected these people?Who do they represent?’
With NGOs, no-one elected them.
And it is very hard to see who they represent.Their financial donors? Their activist supporters? Not clear.
While many NGOs do fantastic work andindeed try to make the world more fair and more just,
(07:58):
it just does not make sense from a democratic point of view
that they should be making decisions on our behalf,rather than elected representatives.
With Trans-National Corporationsand business organisations it is even worse.
Who do they represent?
Here the answer at least is clear.They represent their shareholders
(08:18):
and they are duty-bound to stand up for their interests and to make as much profit as possible for them.
That's their role.
So how can such people possibly be tasked with making decisions for the whole of society?
They are, by definition, legally boundto think about what is best for their shareholders,
(08:39):
a generally small group of wealthy elites,rather than what is best for society as a whole.
And furthermore, they have huge budgets to attend meetingswith large teams of lawyers and large teams of consultants
and can easily outweigh the smaller teamsof people from the NGOs, and even from the states.
(08:59):
So in many cases, multi-stakeholder networksend up being a thinly-veiled form of corporate rule,
with business representativesmaking decisions which benefit their shareholders,
while claiming that they are doingwhat is good for society in general.
In the past few years there has, unfortunately, been a trend towards more and more ‘stakeholder governance’,
(09:21):
and it is making global governance even more un-democratic.
There are now dozens and dozens of multi-stakeholder networks,
such as the World Commission on Dams,
the Alliance for Water Stewardship,
or the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization,otherwise known as GAVI,
where states, companies and NGOs try to come together to solve problems.
(09:42):
But despite the fancy logos and the upbeat press releases,
these networks have not really solved any of these problems,
but have instead instituted market-oriented ‘solutions’
which somehow just happen to make their member companies richer,
while having little or no impact on the intended problem.
Let's look at GAVI as an example,the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.
(10:07):
You’d think they would have been rushing to waive patent rightsand to quickly get the world vaccinated against COVID-19, wouldn’t you?
Well, instead of doing that they created COVAX,
short for ‘COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility’,
along with the World Health Organisationand two other multi-stakeholder networks
the Vaccines Alliance
(10:28):
and CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
So what does COVAX do?
COVAX pools together money from richer governments
and gives it to big pharmaceutical companiesto help them develop COVID vaccines.
The idea is that this will speed up the development of new vaccines
and enable them to be quickly manufactured on a big scale.
(10:50):
COVAX is also supposed to help distribute vaccines to poorer countries,
by supplying enough vaccines to vaccinate 20% of their population.
So basically COVAX gives public moneyto private corporations to develop vaccines.
It then allows these corporations to sell the vaccines back to the governments
(11:10):
at whatever market price they can negotiate.
So that the the governments essentially pay for them twice.
And after that it facilitates the distributionof a woefully small number of vaccines to poorer countries.
Isn’t this simply an embarrassment?
An example of what kind of system gets established when private companies are in the driving seat?
(11:32):
If we really wanted to distribute COVID vaccinesquickly and equitably round the world
and avert the huge global crisis which we are currently in,
we would have firstly made the companies sell their vaccines at cost price, or perhaps with a very small profit.
Secondly, we would ensure that patents are waived,at least during the pandemic crisis,
(11:54):
and that knowledge and skills about how to manufacture the vaccines
are actively transferred to as many countries and companies as possible.
That way global production could bemassively ramped up, and of course, prices kept down.
By doing this, far more people would have access to COVID vaccines far more quickly,
and the pandemic would be ended much more rapidly for everyone.
(12:16):
But then the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t have made such big profits.
Today their directors and shareholders have made billions.
And this is precisely the problem of lettingprivate companies get involved in global governance
under the guise of ‘multi-stakeholder governance’.
It leads to benefits for these companies,and woefully inadequate solutions for the rest of society.
(12:39):
Now you might think that it can’t get any worse. But unfortunately it can.
A third type of global governance arrangement that is growing rapidly, is private governance,
governance arrangements that are openly run by private companies,
without being dressed up as being multi-stakeholder arrangements or anything else.
(13:00):
You may have heard of SWIFT,the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication,
and you may have used it when you transferred money from your country to another country.
It has developed technical standardsand coding systems for banks all over the world.
But did you know that it is a private corporation?Privately owned by some 2,500 banks?
(13:24):
And did you realise that it is developing these standards and guidelines
independently from any national and intergovernmental regulation?
So what we have with a system in which the banksmake their own rules without any governmental oversight?
And after all the banking crashes of the past few years,
do we think nothing can go wrong?
(13:47):
Another example of private global governance is ICANN,
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names.
This is a private non-profit organisation which manages the centralized domain name system, the DNS,
to control the routing for the vast majority of global Internet traffic.
With the huge and ever-growing power of the internet,does it make sense to have it governed by a private corporation?
(14:14):
Wouldn’t it be better if there was state-based oversight and regulation,
by democratically elected global representatives?
Even more worrying is the growing systemof privately run global courts and arbitration tribunals
that is beginning to form the mainenforcement mechanisms for trans-border business relations,
both between companies,and between companies and states.
(14:37):
You see, as more and more companiesare doing business across state borders,
they have realised that they needsome form of global enforcerment mechanism
to ensure that they and their partners keep their agreements.
And in contrast to the area of human rights law,that I discussed in another video,
these companies do not accept somewishy-washy voluntary system of ‘recommendations’.
(15:01):
They want a system of binding international business lawthat is backed up by global courts.
But rather than have a state-based system of global courts,
where we can ensure that judges are chosen fairlyand that democratically created law is applied appropriately,
what has happened is the creation of a number of private tribunals,
(15:21):
with judges overwhelmingly from the private sector,
making decisions behind closed doors,and very often favouring private companies over states.
Futhermore, there has to be something very wrongwith our overall global governance system
if we allow companies to set up privateglobal courts and tribunals to enforce business law,
but we say it is impossible, or unfeasible,to set up global courts to enforce human rights law.
(15:47):
Why the difference?
Why does business law have more power than human rights law?
Could it be because companies are increasingly taking part in global governance,
making the decisions and setting up the systems?
Is this the type of global governance that we, the people of the world, want?
(16:07):
Wouldn’t it be far, far better to have a global democracy?
So that we can have a say in whatstructures and laws are made at the global level?
Wouldn’t that allow us to build a much better system of global governance,
or even global government,
in which the rules and laws empower us, the people,and not just the elites and the corporations?
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