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Divided Nations

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Divided Nations

Why Global Governance Is Failing, and What We Can Do About It

Oxford UP,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Society must manage the downsides of globalization: pandemics, cybercrime, migration and more.

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Overview
  • Visionary

Recommendation

Citizens, governments, institutions and corporations face enormous worldwide problems. Scholar and author Ian Goldin details the threats spawned by increasing connectivity and globalization while shedding more light than hope about them. The threats he mentions include pandemics, climate change, financial meltdown, cybercrime and migration pressures. Goldin explains why the international institutions created to solve 20th-century problems have become inadequate, and he advocates more radical thinking. Unsurprisingly, outlining these hazards proves easier than finding viable solutions; world governance is not subject to overnight reform. Goldin pins his hopes on streamlined, collective decision making and on bringing those who cause problems together with those who suffer from them. He urges society to confront these issues now, but feels that the world may need another major catastrophe to inspire lasting solutions. getAbstract recommends his lucid warnings to governments, policy makers, economic leaders, NGOs, futurists and concerned citizens.

Summary

Effective Global Governance

Globalization is obviously successful, as proved by the attendant rise in worldwide living standards. But as a result of globalization and its physical and electronic connectivity, a collection of serious crises will likely push the world backward into a new protectionism.

As the positive offerings of globalization slide into reverse, the Earth’s poorest will suffer most. The situation is complex and varies from country to country. The benefits of globalization have not yet touched the two billion people who earn $2 a day or less. Still others continue to suffer from corrupt governments that control the proceeds of their emerging nations’ mineral wealth.

Growing levels of connectivity continue to undermine the effect of local solutions. National and global responses to problems must be linked. The ideal would be to deal with problems as locally as possible and rely on international governance only when the situation calls for it.

Five Threats

In an age of “hyper-connectivity,” the world faces five pressing, unprecedented challenges, including:

  1. “Pandemics” – Rising populations, increasingly ...

About the Author

Ian Goldin, director of Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, has worked at international organizations and also wrote Globalization For Development and Exceptional People.

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