Global governance: just a mirage?

With the number of intractable global problems mounting inexorably, an effective system of global governance has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many decades now. It may now be as far away as ever. After an amicable but somewhat ineffective G20 summit in Toronto, Philip Stephens of the FT points out that, now the immediate financial crisis has waned, the imperative for governments to come together and co-ordinate policy across borders has also diminished. Voters, he says, expect their national government to ‘shelter them from the storms’, and governments don’t want to admit that they can’t do so without help from outside, and so resist moves that would require them to cede sovereignty.

What’s interesting is the potential contradiction at the heart of public opinion on this issue that our data reveals. The political pressure from voters for visible, unilateral action that Stephens identifies is real enough. But in the latest wave of our tracking in late summer 2009 we saw a remarkable upswing in trust in national governments to act in the interests of society (as the chart below shows)– just at a time when those governments were being forced by circumstances to come together and co-operate in a way rarely seen before. Voters may not like the idea of ceding power outside their borders, but appear to like it when progress is made. Maybe governments need to take heart from this and be more honest with voters about the pooling of sovereignty that is needed to address many of the issues that most concern them.

But if the autumn of 2008 represented a high-water mark in cooperation among national governments, December 2009 and the failure to come up with any sort of adequate deal to address climate change at Copenhagen was surely a nadir. Our next wave of tracking of trust in government, due out later this year, will show whether the mini-boom in public confidence in governments has, like the aforementioned pot of gold, vanished into thin air as soon as it appeared.