The United Nations, Civil Society, and the Private Sector in Global Governance

This course is organized around one of the late twentieth century's most challenging intellectual and practical puzzles, a puzzle that challenges the core of the interstate legal order's foundations in state sovereignty: Initiating and sustaining effective international responses to threats to human security require new forms of governance, integrating more fully nonstate entities with state entities at and across all levels of governance. Individuals and groups acting in the name of states and intergovernmental organizations have generally found the policy mechanisms under their control to be insufficient for responding effectively to war, civil strife, poverty, malnutrition, pandemic diseases, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and the multitude of other threats to human security. For their part, civic-based actors seldom possess sufficient resources, authority, or the requisite capacity for launching successful large-scale independent policy initiatives and therefore exert only meager influence on global developments.

Building and sustaining cooperation between public and civic-based entities, however, has proved to be an elusive objective. The foundation of the UN system in the principle of the inviolability of state sovereignty greatly constrains and inhibits UN agencies from engaging civic and subnational state entities constructively. In this context emerges an overriding challenge: how to generate and sustain effective cooperation both horizontally across differing autonomous organizational domains, legal jurisdictions, and sectors of society and vertically across time as well as across different levels of social aggregation from the micro level of individuals in their roles in groups, organizations, and communities to the macro level of representative governance in international forums.