The future of (non-)global governance

Abstract

The title of this paper sounds preposterous, and indeed is. There are many reasons for this qualification and, pre-empting criticisms, I mention three main ones. The first is that any exercise in futurology bears a touch of ridicule or naiveté. As my savvy econometrics teacher used to say in his forecasting lectures (a long time ago, in rainy London): in difficult and very visible situations, a good strategy is to stress the worst outcomes. In case they do not occur, everybody will be happy with the better results and not blame you too much. If they do take place, you will be considered a bold forecaster who did not hesitate to announce the bad prospects. I warn that, despite my conclusions cannot be considered optimistic, I do not have used this strategy here. The second is that Global Governance (GG) has nowadays so many and oftentimes unsuspected forms of influence and control that statements on the future architecture of such a complex system – or rather, network – may easily lack credibility. My excuse in this case is that I outline basic trends, with one clear outcome. I, and probably anyone, am of course unable to predict what Gestalt will the couple COP – Conference of the Parties and its scientific arm, the IPCC - International Panel on Climate Change, assume twenty years from now, or how specific world economic managing and regulation institutions, or those dealing with other realms of international interaction, like air and maritime transportation, or legal regimes for the space, the electro-magnetic spectrum and the web galaxy will be, though, from my predicted global outcome, one could broadly speculate on their fate, when a significant number of them will be more regionalised or even fragmented. Thirdly, in a world where not only events, but black swans and the crossing of tipping points are becoming monthly, or even weakly events, a given sequence of those may completely change environmental conditions and turn the most careful forecasting exercise into useless rhetoric. This is perhaps the most difficult point and I here resort to modellers’ great logic excuse which is the ceteris paribus assumption