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Many of the pressing policy challenges confronting the world’s countries and peoples—climate change, pandemics, food and water scarcity, terrorism, financial meltdown—are international in origin and nature, global in scope and effects, and require concerted multilateral action led by the major powers. However, the responsibility for making policy and the authority to mobilize the requisite coercive resources to tackle the threats remain vested in sovereign states. Absent a world government, the order, stability, and predictability in international transactions comes from global governance operating as a patchwork of authority structures which produce generally adhered-to norms to regulate behavior, and layers of mechanisms to punish noncompliance.1 The architecture of global governance consists of international and regional intergovernmental organizations; a ‘soft’ layer of informal general-purpose groupings of states—such as the old G7, new G20, and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) groupings; as well as transnational civil society and market actors that have exploded in numbers, role, and influence.
Langmore et al. (2016) studied this question.