People-centred Global Governance

Summary

As global problems such as global warming, global poverty, pollution, terrorism and runaway corporate power increasingly outstrip the capacity of national and international governance institutions to solve them, the issue of global governance is rapidly moving up the international political agenda. In this book, Bunzl draws on the work of a number of leading evolutionary thinkers to show that both the process of globalisation itself, and the evolution of a binding system of global governance, are natural parts of human evolution.

The central dilemma of achieving a healthy form of global governance, Bunzl shows, is that its implementation must be by popular consent, and yet it must also be consented to and implemented by nation-states. For only nation-states have the authority and capacity to do so. But present inter-governmental efforts to solve global warming and other global problems are proving wholly inadequate and are showing the nation-state system to be incapable of such a move. The solution, Bunzl argues, is to devise a way for global citizens to use their votes in their respective national elections to drive their politicians and governments to implement global governance and to do so in a way that does not require nations to act against their own self-interest. Furthermore, he presents the Simultaneous Policy as one means by which this can be achieved, arguing it to be the world's first genuine form of global electoral politics.

Beyond this, if the evolution of global governance is a natural, albeit by no means assured, evolutionary phenomenon, Bunzl argues that any organisation purporting to become the world’s over-arching institution of global governance would likely have to display characteristics which are in substantial accord with the dynamics of evolutionary transformation. These dynamics have, after all, already been set out very clearly by the prominent American philosopher, Ken Wilber, in his “20 Tenets of holons and holarchies". The value of Wilber’s 20 Tenets is that they provide reasonably objective criteria against which to analyse and compare the various existing and emergent global governance initiatives (as well as existing institutions such as the United Nations) to assess their potential, or otherwise, for evolving to become the world's organisation of binding global governance.

Bunzl proceeds to analyse the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO), tenet by tenet, making a convincing argument as to its congruity with Wilber's Tenets and its potential for effecting global transformation at all levels of the human social holarchy towards a system of people-centred global governance. ISPO is also briefly viewed from Wilber's "all-quadrant, all-level (AQAL)" standpoint and ISPO's progress in the real world is also discussed, showing that it is already in the process of its own becoming.

By analysing ISPO in this way, Bunzl lays down the gauntlet - a challenge - to all other would-be global governance initiatives to declare themselves in similar fashion. From such a debate, both those with a special interest in globalisation and governance and the wider public will be able to see which initiatives have the potential to succeed and thus merit our active involvement and support.