February 2009

A Fresh Look at Global Governance: Exploring Objective Criteria for Representation

This paper examines what constitutes a system of global governance in the geopolitical world of the 21st century. The authors propose simple, fundamental criteria - based on global shares of GDP and population - around which global governance might be organized. They analyze the role that these criteria would assign to different countries and compare them with some of the key components of the system of governance currently in place - the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN. They find major disparities, which suggest the need for fundamental changes in sharp contrast to the incremental changes that are currently being considered.

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