Making the World Great Again: Using Global Public Goods to Enhance Global Governance Outcomes

How can global governance (GG) facilitate international cooperation to improve the production of global public goods (GPGs)? This Working Paper argues that using GPGs as the basis for analysis of GG clarifies the cooperation challenges at the heart of different GPGs and provides a coherent framework to assess what pathways are likely to effectively produce GPGs.

This analysis uses GPG scholarship as a theoretical basis to analyse how GG can re-frame intractable cooperation challenges amidst a web of different interests and incentives across multiple levels of governance. It concludes that for aggregate-effort GPGs, such as climate stability, a critical mass of ambitious actors, leveraging win-win cooperation, is most likely to be effective. GG should therefore embrace polycentricity and support multi-level 'winning coalitions', involving states, businesses and civil society from both Global North and South, that create the critical mass necessary for GPG production.

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