The Meaning of World Culture
Isabel A. Tejada-Garcia
Multicultural Dimensions
Paper #2: “The Meaning of World Culture”
There is still yet not to be global governance for the world today, but people travel from one country to another; goods and services are freighted across land, air, sea and cyberspace; and the whole range of other cross-border activates take place in reasonable expectation of safety and security for the people, groups, firms, and government involved. Traditionally governance has been associated with “governing,” or with political authority, institutions, and, ultimately, control. Governance in this sense denotes formal political institutions that both aim to coordinate and control interdependent social relations and that also possess the capacity to enforce decisions. Global governance can thus be defined as the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate trans-border relations between states, cultures, citizens, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the market. It embraces the totality of institutions, policies, rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their citizens try to bring more predictability, stability, and order to their responses to transnational challenges, such as climate change and environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism, which go beyond the capacity of a single state to solve.
State-centered structures help ensure international order now find themselves sharing more and more of the governance stage. Depending on the issue-area, geographic location, and timing, there are vast disparities in power and influence among states, intergovernmental organizations, TNCs, and international NGOs. Consequently, today’s world is governed by an indistinct patchwork of authority that is as diffuse as it is contingent. In particular, the IGOs that collectively underpin global governance are not only insufficient in number but are inadequately resourced, lack
Multicultural Dimensions
Paper #2: “The Meaning of World Culture”
There is still yet not to be global governance for the world today, but people travel from one country to another; goods and services are freighted across land, air, sea and cyberspace; and the whole range of other cross-border activates take place in reasonable expectation of safety and security for the people, groups, firms, and government involved. Traditionally governance has been associated with “governing,” or with political authority, institutions, and, ultimately, control. Governance in this sense denotes formal political institutions that both aim to coordinate and control interdependent social relations and that also possess the capacity to enforce decisions. Global governance can thus be defined as the sum of laws, norms, policies, and institutions that define, constitute, and mediate trans-border relations between states, cultures, citizens, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and the market. It embraces the totality of institutions, policies, rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their citizens try to bring more predictability, stability, and order to their responses to transnational challenges, such as climate change and environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism, which go beyond the capacity of a single state to solve.
State-centered structures help ensure international order now find themselves sharing more and more of the governance stage. Depending on the issue-area, geographic location, and timing, there are vast disparities in power and influence among states, intergovernmental organizations, TNCs, and international NGOs. Consequently, today’s world is governed by an indistinct patchwork of authority that is as diffuse as it is contingent. In particular, the IGOs that collectively underpin global governance are not only insufficient in number but are inadequately resourced, lack