Introduction

The global issues with which policymakers the world over are now grappling cover a formidably broad canvas of economic, environmental, social, developmental and security issues. The difficulty that traditional governments and intergovernmental institutions find in dealing with these problems is compounded by the very visible rise in salience and policy impact in recent decades, both for good and evil, of non-state actors.

Those actors extend across the spectrum from extremist terrorist organizations, to multinational corporations, through to influential non-governmental organizations like Human Rights Watch, my own International Crisis Group (about which I’ll talk in detail today) and Médecins Sans Frontières. Individual states and state-centric structures no longer enjoy a monopoly over the collective efforts to improve international society and world order. They share the crowded governance stage with many other influential players.

It is not at all obvious that our present institutions of regional and global governance are sufficiently fit for purpose when it comes to getting effective cooperative international action of the kind necessary to achieve so many global public goods, or to resolve so many kinds of problems that are beyond the capacity of any country to address alone. To find effective solutions to most current global problems there are, in the very useful analysis of my ANU colleague Ramesh Thakur, five big gaps that need to be closed, which we have done so far only very erratically and incompletely.

There is the knowledge gap (ensuring that all the relevant players know that the problem exists), the normative gap (ensuring that there is a will to resolve the problem, and some sense of the standards of behaviour applicable), the policy gap (generating understanding and agreement about the right levers to pull in response to a particular problem), the institutional gap (having the machinery to deliver effective results), and the compliance gap (ensuring that the decisions of international executive or judicial bodies are actually carried out).