Barcelona Workshop on Global Governance 2022

“Global Crises and Global Governance”

The start of the twenty-first century has been beset by global crises. From the economic meltdown of 2008 to the explosion of COVID-19 in 2020, problems seem to be rapidly stretching beyond borders and beyond our control. Global institutions have been created to manage such cross-border challenges, but appear increasingly inadequate and unable to adapt to this new environment. Rather than working together against common threats, states have often veered towards unilateralism or are deeply divided over multilateral solutions. Meanwhile, a host of novel governance arrangements, including multi-stakeholder organizations and private initiatives, have emerged and now coexist with traditional international organizations, but their problem-solving capacity remains an open question. All of this sharply contrasts with the patterns seen in the immediate post-Cold War period, when cooperation appeared to reach new heights, and raises crucial questions for scholars of global governance. These include:

How can we conceptualize and compare crises and crisis responses?
Why do we see different types of cross-border crises occurring?
What are the short-term and long-term impacts of crises on cooperation?
Who is involved in addressing crises and what roles have they played?
When are institutions able to adapt to and address new challenges?
What can be done to improve institutional performance in the future?

In this iteration of the Barcelona Workshop on Global Governance we seek to explore these difficult but pressing questions, bringing together a dynamic group of scholars from different theoretical approaches and analytical traditions.