14 January 2021 - 15:00 - 16:00 CET

Alexandru Grigorescu (Loyola University Chicago) joins the GLOBE Webinar Series to discuss his new book, The Ebb and Flow of Global Governance: Intergovernmentalism Versus Nongovernmentalism in World Politics (Cambridge 2020). Jacint Jordana (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals) will offer some reflections to kick off the discussion before a Q&A with the audience.

About the book: Challenging the traditionally dichotomous distinction between international intergovernmental organizations and international nongovernmental organizations, Grigorescu argues that international organizations are best understood as falling on an 'intergovernmental-nongovernmental continuum'. The placement of organizations on this continuum is determined by how much government involvement factors into their decision-making, financing, and deliberations. Using this fine-grained conceptualization, Grigorescu uncovers numerous changes in the intergovernmental versus nongovernmental nature of global governance over the past century and a half. These changes are due primarily to ideological and institutional domestic shifts in powerful states. The book assesses the plausibility of these arguments through archival research on a dozen organizations from the global health, labor, and technical standards realms and concludes that there has been a continuous ebb and flow in world politics, rather than an inexorable movement towards greater roles for nongovernmental actors.

About the author: Alexandru Grigorescu is a professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Democratic Intergovernmental Organizations? (Cambridge, 2015). Prior to his academic career he worked as a diplomat in the Romanian Foreign Ministry and at the United Nations.

Discussant: Jacint Jordana (IBEI)
Moderator: Kari Otteburn (KU Leuven) 

Participation is free.

ABOUT GLOBE:

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program, the Project “Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios” (GLOBE) addresses the strategic priorities identified in the EU Global Strategy such as – trade, development, security and climate change – as well as migration and global finance, in order to identify the major roadblocks to effective and coherent global governance by multiple stakeholders in a multipolar world. GLOBE seeks to provide policy makers, academics and the general public with an analytical grip on the state of play in global governance, by developing new theoretical and methodological approaches. It also hopes to equip national and European policy makers with tools to identify constraints and opportunities in a set of global governance scenarios for 2030 and