Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements R. O'Brien, A. M. Goetz, J. A. Scholte and M. Williams, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000

✍ Scribed by Martin Rhodes

• Book ID: 102276348
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 63 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1076-9307
• DOI: 10.1002/ijfe.175

✦ Synopsis

Although first brought to world attention by the anti-globalization protest in Seattle in April 2000, the 'contestation of global governance'}as this book describes it}has been significant enough to produce speculation about its impact on the international political order since at least the early 1990s. Since Seattle (and Gothenburg and Genoa) we are all now aware that alongside the well-known NGOs such as Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and Transparency International, working in areas spanning development, anti-poverty policies, the environment, and corruption, there are now thousands of smaller groups world-wide that are prepared to mobilize and militate in favour of an alternative agenda (or rather myriad agendas) to the so-called 'neo-liberal' economic consensus.

Anyone seeking to understand the background to this phenomenon could well start with this book and its authoritative guide to the contestation of the role of international organizations}the troika of the IMF, WTO and World Bank}by women's movements, trade unions and environmental and developmental NGOs. This book gives plenty of information of how and with what effect this contestation takes place. What the book is much less successful in achieving is convincing empirical support for its core thesis, that nation-states are being displaced in the international arena by this kind of activity.

The first chapter engages with some (but not enough) of the international relations literature and proposes an understanding of the world in terms of 'complex multilateralism'. According to the authors, a traditional understanding of multilateralism as a 'top down affair where state-dominated institutions are taken as given' should be replaced by one in which relations between states, multilateral economic institutions (MEIs) and global social movements (or GSMs) are constituting a new transnational sphere. State-centric or 'realist' interpretations of international relations have therefore had their day. But what evidence is presented for this thesis?

Chapter 2 examines the role of the women's movement vis-" a a-vis the World Bank and is attributed some public relations success in alerting the Bank to the importance of gender issues in its development programmes. Nevertheless, the authors admit that the women's movement is heavily divided internationally and that this, plus the continued importance of nation-states where 'the movement' has little influence or representation, has limited its impact. The impact of the labour movement on the WTO}which is the subject of Chapter 3}is also shown to have been hampered, not just by the opposition of many states to core labour standards as a protectionist device but also by that of some developing country unions. Chapter 4 on the influence of the environmental movement on the WTO and World Bank shows a greater impact (on the latter if not the former) and provides clear evidence, according to the authors, that the primacy of the state is being bypassed by complex MEI-GSM linkages. But Chapter 5, on social movements and the IMF, again provides little evidence that GSMs are having a major impact on the way this organization operates. Nevertheless, the authors are insistent that social movement campaigns have helped to sustain a critical debate against what they call 'one paradigm neoliberalism ' (p. 205).

As one proceeds through the book, a number of problems with the analysis become obvious. First, having made great claims that GSMs are having an important influence on international organizations} such as to warrant a new understanding of the world in terms of 'complex multilateralism'}the authors are