The Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World
A citizens’ movement for thinking and action. Movements and persons from 115 countries
Preparation of an World Citizens’ Assembly in 2001
Local Groups, Colleges and Topical Workshops.
Web : http://.alliance21.org/en/themes/global.htm   E-mail :  info@alliance21.org
Des groupes locaux, des collèges et des chantiers thématiques.

Web : http://www.alliance21.org/fr/themes/global.htm– Email : alliance@echo.org

Re-modelling global governance to meet the challenges
 of the 21st century

Current governance is no longer adapted to the challenges of tomorrow’s world.  Its architecture must be based on a new vision of the world and on principles of governance acknowledged by all so as to establish its legitimacy.

A synthesis proposed by Pierre Calame

Written on : 09/10/01
Updated : 12/10/01	N°BIP : 	Nomenclature : AVE38	Path and electronic name : ct-djd/c/Texte/AVE/AVE3/AVE38 /Globgov.doc 	

Key words : GLOBAL GOVERNANCE; DEMOCRACY; INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC ; HISTORY ; CRISIS ; STATE ; GOVERNANCE LEGITIMACY ; INTERNATIONAL LAW ; POLITICS ; PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY ; TAXES ; MARKETPLACE ; NATURAL RESOURCES ; GLOBAL PUBLIC DOMAIN ; EXCHANGING EXPERIENCES   ; INFORMATION SYSTEM ;  INDICATOR ; TRAINING PROCESS ; TIME MANAGEMENT ; SHORT-TERM LONG-TERM RELATIONS ; PRECAUTION PRINCIPLE ; STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS ; TERRITORY ; LOCAL ECONOMY ; ACTIVE SUBSIDIARITY ; TERRITORIAL COMMUNITIES ; PARTNERSHIP ; CONTRACT ; SOCIAL CONTRACT ; PUBLIC DEBATE ; INTERNET ; PROPOSAL POWER ; INSTITUTIONAL ENGINEERING ; AUDIT.. 

Quoted geographic zones : WORLD ; THIRD WORLD;  EUROPE ; USA.

Summary : In the last fifty years rudiments of world governance have appeared.  But during this same period, interdependencies between the world’s societies and between humankind and the biosphere have evolved much more rapidly.  Current global governance, still based on relations between sovereign states, no longer measures up to the challenges of today’s world and suffers from a lack of legitimacy.  A new architecture is needed.  It is based on principles that can be applied to all levels of governance and on reflections and innovations that have appeared over the years and in various fields.  It contains six dimensions : the creation of ethical and constitutional foundations for legitimate governance ; the defining of common foundations for the management of different categories of goods ; controlling exchanges and the pace of evolution ; the organising of relations between different levels of governance and between actors; renewing the methods of deliberation, of decision-making, of control and management.  Thirty-six proposals provide these different dimensions with concrete recommendations.	

The elaboration process for this proposals booklet

After a long maturing process, the initiative for the launching of the Alliance workshop for global governance was taken at the beginning of the year 2000 by : Stéphane Hessel (international civil servant at the United Nations  in New-York from 1946 to 1950, then assistant administrator of the UNDP from 1970 to 1972.  French Ambassador to the United Nations since 1977.  Currently honorary French Ambassador.  Member of the High Council for International Co-operation  since 1999); Jérôme Vignon (worked on the application of regional sector-based policies at the Planning Commission (Commissariat au Plan) and was for 15 years was alongside Jacques Delors at the Forward Studies Unit at the European Commission.  Has been in charge of the elaboration of the White Book on European governance since Fall 2000);  Georges Berthoin (Jean Monnet’s Cabinet Director at the European Commission in 1952.  Past European Commission Ambassador in London.  International President of the European Movement.  Co-president of the Trilateral Commission for the last 17 years); and Pierre Calame (president of the Charles-Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind (FPH) ).  They drew up an initial draft of proposals which they submitted for deliberation to an international network of individuals who reflect on these issues and who come from different geographical and professional horizons.

In June 2000 an international gathering of 20 people working on various subjects such as water, energy, financial markets, security, environment, culture, and international trade permitted the contrasting of world governance challenges in each of these fields.  The contributions and reflections that the initial draft contained were used by this first group to produce a new version that was sent to all the Heads of State before the UN Millennial Conference.  This text, also present on the Alliance web site (www.alliance21.org), was greeted with general enthusiasm.  Also, very precious comments  were provided by different specialists.

During the year 2001, each Alliance workshop produced its “proposals booklet” for the World Citizens Assembly that will be held in Lille from 2 to 10 December 2001.  Some of these booklets contain useful ideas and often they contain proposals for global governance.  Other movements that are participating in the Alliance or are close to it have also produced useful reflections and ideas.

All of these contributions have been used in the creation of this present version.  Although it concerns the results of a collective reflection, the author is wholly responsible for this summary’s contents.  

Paris, October 12, 2001

Pierre Calame

CONTENTS

Introduction :  The crisis of global governance and the need for a new architecture…………………………………………………………………7

1-  Systems of world-wide regulation are no longer at the height of humankind’s challenges.	7

2- Current modes of regulation, that favour the most powerful actors, don’t give real legitimacy global governance.	11

3-  Global governance can no longer be based on a fictional relationship between sovereign states.	12

4-  A new architecture is necessary	14

Chapter I :  Establishing a legitimate global governance………………16

1- The international community must agree on shared objectives.	166

Proposal 1    The constitutional expression of global governance objectives.	177

2- The international community must agree on common ethical foundations.	18

Proposal 2	Making the Human Responsibilities Charter the third constitutional pillar of the international community.	19
Proposal 3   Establishing a hierarchy of norms and rules, common to all international institutions.	20

3- The international community should define, within the Charter, the areas of legitimate intervention.	21

Proposal 4  A Human Responsibilities Charter for defining global governance’s fields of areas of intervention.	21

4- Global governance must embrace the conditions of legitimacy.	233

Proposal 5   Fixing “ the great global causes ” that are within the scope of global policies carried out by all agencies.	23
Proposal 6   Presenting an annual report on the state of the world…………………………………24
Proposal 7   Creating a democratic framework for fixing international agendas.	255
Proposal 8   Guaranteeing the fairness of treatment and sanctions in all international agreements.	…………………………………………………………………………………………255
Proposal 9	Creating an independent international institution for advising and supporting the weakest actors.	…………………………………………………………………………………………266
Proposal 10              Conditions for the responsibility of agents of international institutions……277

Chapter II :    Establishing a global democratic community…………..299

1 - The creation of a global community should reflect society’s diversity.	299

2 - It is essential to back the emergence of regional and intermediary levels situated between states and the world.	30

Proposal 11	Establishing regional communities.	311

3 - Global governance should guarantee the representation of the points of view of different milieus.	322

Proposal 12	Establishing collegial communities.	344

4-   National parliaments have a role to play in building the global community.	355

Proposal 13	Establishing regional federations and a global federation of parliaments….	366

5-  The building of an international community should be punctuated by founding acts.	37

Proposal 14	   Organising a planetary constitutional assembly in 2008.	377

6- The building of an international community requires stable funding and redistribution systems.	388

Proposal 15  Creating a global fiscal system.	388

Chapter III :  Defining common rules for the management of different categories of goods………………………………………………………...399

1- Only some goods are linked to the market.	399

Proposal 16   Agreeing on a goods and services typology and defining those that concern the marketplace.	399

2-   The international community has to come to an agreement concerning the nature and management of global public goods.	411

Proposal 17  Defining global public goods and funding their protection.	422

3- The international community has to agree on the nature, the management and the sharing of natural resources.	43

Proposal 18	Fixing common global rules for the management of natural resources.	466

4- The international community should promote the goods that multiply when shared.	477

Proposal 19	Organising the world-wide mutualisation of goods that multiply.	488

Chapter IV: Controlling exchanges, controlling the pace of evolution  499

1- The organisation of information systems is one of global governance’s major issues.	499

Proposal 20	Structuring independent information systems at a global level	511
Proposal 21  Encouraging the emergence of virtual learning communities.	522

2-  Measuring systems should highlight material exchanges and human development.	522

Proposal 22	Creating a system for measuring exchange and the actual degree of development………………………………………………………………………………………………….533

3-  Global governance should make it possible for humankind to control the pace of its evolution.	533

Proposal 23	Establishing regular sabbaticals for the international community.	544
Proposal 24   Making the precaution principle a shared model of responsibility.	544
Proposal 25	Elaborating very long-term strategies in vital fields.	556

Chapter V :  Favoring and organising relations   ……………………...577

1- The world is a system of relations..	577

Proposal 26	Training actors for an integrated and partnership-based approach.	599

2- Global governance is based on the active subsidiarity principle.	599

Proposal 27	Organising relations between global governance and states in accordance with the active subsidiarity principle.	60
Proposal 28	Recognising the important role of international networks of territorial authorities……………………………………………………………………………………………………622

3- Governance organises co-operation between actors.	623

Proposal 29	Systematising co-operation between multilateral agencies	633
Proposal 30  Creating the conditions for a partnership between public and private actors.	64

4 – Global governance organises contractual bonds within society..	655

Proposal 31  Building a contractual framework for partnerships between actors.	677

Chapter VI :  Re-modelling methods…………………………………….68

1- The organisation of the global agora 	699

Proposal 32	creating  global public areas where citizens can debate	70

2 – The proposal elaboration and decision-making processes.	71

Proposal 33  Giving the Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations a proposal-making monopoly for international decisions.	722

3 - monitoring of the application of international decisions.	73

Proposal 34	 Endowing a council of Elders with the responsibility of questioning public officials.	73
Proposal 35  Holding planetary parliaments annually.	744

4 – The continual evaluation of the global governance system.	755

Proposal 36	Establishing a permanent audit of multilateral institutions.	75

Introduction :  The crisis of global governance and the need for a new architecture

1- Systems of world-wide regulation are no longer at the height of humankind’s challenges.

Most will agree that international relations are today badly undermined by serious failings.  While planetary union is growing, so is the consciousness of humankind’s vulnerability.

Day by day, the gap widens between, on one hand, the interdependencies that link the people of the entire world, that each day bring more substance to the idea of humankind or the human family, that make the planet a global village, and, on the other hand, the legal measures designed to organise international relations.  The global village is devoid of rules and cohesiveness and has neglected the redistribution of resources.  Nor is there justice.  This results in the assumption  or fear that the global village is only of benefit to its most powerful members.

Day by day, the interdependency between humankind and the biosphere is becoming more apparent and far-reaching.  Humankind is on the verge of, and perhaps has already begun, upsetting the fragile equilibriums that life on earth depends on.  Despite the situation’s gravity and the multiplication of international conferences and speeches, no efficient regulating apparatus has appeared that can adequately address today’s challenges and critical issues.  Relations between states have not led to the creation of the courageous, long-term strategies that the situation requires.

Governance crises, including those of global governance, are for the most part the product of thought systems and institutions that don’t evolve at the same pace as society itself.   As a result, big gaps are appearing between these systems and society.  We deal with tomorrow’s challenges with the concepts and ideologies born one or two centuries ago and we deal with tomorrow’s problems with institutional systems adapted to outdated problems and to a society of the past.

In a world carried along by science’s rapid evolution and by the development of economy and exchanges, as has been the case for fifty years, the fact that ideology and politics are lagging far behind the economic, social and cultural realms can rapidly have dramatic consequences.

The trauma provoked by World War II was so great that everyone was conscious that the world  had dramatically changed and that new institutional systems were needed.   It’s in this context that the European Union began to be built and that the institutions of the United Nations were founded. This creative momentum for reform must be revived in order, for instance, to help war-torn societies rebuild, to facilitate the transition of ex-Eastern bloc countries, to extend the consciousness of a world community, to lead the transition towards a model of durable development and to alter the current representation of relations between humankind and the biosphere.

The problem is that over the last fifty years the world has changed at a considerable speed, disrupting the context in which the international institutions were founded, and without a trauma of global proportions leading to a new momentum equivalent to that of fifty years ago.  We have forgotten that it was the inability of European societies to establish a political order adapted to economic development that precipitated Europe and the world into two world wars.  Yet forerunning signs of more global chaos are not lacking in today’s world.   The last of these were international terrorism’s strikes against the U.S., reminding us of the ties between injustice, the arms and drugs trade, and the financing of terrorism.  But there have been other such signs: the social dramas induced by the management of the 1997 financial crisis which highlighted the absence of a solid framework of regulation adapted to the modernisation of financial markets.  Or the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect, reflecting the breadth of the impact of human activity on the biosphere’s major equilibriums.  Or the ever-growing demonstrations protesting a form of globalisation reduced to economic globalisation.  All of these events haven’t yet proved to be enough to instil a real global consciousness of the fact that international regulation systems aren’t adapted to the world’s interdependencies.  For too long the cold-war rivalry between the “capitalist” bloc and the “communist” bloc made allegiance to one of the leaders of these blocs a much more important priority than the notion of building an international community. 

Over the last century, scientific and technological evolution, in particular with the telecommunications revolution, the globalisation of trade and the liberalisation of financial markers, have been the primary forces behind the growth of connections between different parts of the world.

As a result of this, globalisation, i.e., the emergence of a community of peoples whose destinies are intertwined, has been reduced to mere economic globalisation, that is to say, the never-ending expansion of trade.

Giant transnational economic groups, whose sheer size and vast human resources ensure them the only roles that measure up to new realities, have a dominant position.  Fifty-two of the one hundred biggest international organisations are companies and forty-eight are countries.   Because of their power, these groups are endowed with responsibilities that they are neither designed for, nor willing to take upon themselves; and at the global level they are submitted to no rules nor monitoring.   

Over the last fifty years a new form of “global governance” has come into being.

Following the creation of such institutions as Bretton Woods (the IMF and the World Bank), the San Francisco Agreement on the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many international regulations have appeared.   These have resulted in the opening of the world market and the elaboration of a foundation for an ethical system of universal scope.  They have brought democratic principles to the forefront, making these a reference for the majority of states.  They have thus contributed themselves to an evolution of material and human progress and, hence, to the growth of interdependencies between human beings and between humankind and the rest of the living world.  It is this rapid evolution, in fact, that is making all current forms of governance obsolete despite constant, but incomplete, efforts to adapt.

Humankind is entering a new era, but ideas, institutions and  methods of governance haven’t followed, in particular at the global level.   A feeling of belonging to one human race has not yet led to the birth of a real global community, conscious of itself and capable of creating the institutions and rules that it requires for its well-being, for peace or simply for its survival.

Institutions have a life of their own.  They are constantly adapting to new situations but without re-modelling their basic foundations.  Thus, the different agencies of the UN were each conceived to address a certain category of issues by means of a dialogue between states.   Also, their sectoral specialisations are dated.  Personnel recruitment is still based on a balance between states and the priority accorded to technicity in each of the concerned fields.  However, over the last fifty years the very nature of the problems and operations the agencies deal with has changed.

The WHO, for example, well adapted to helping new independent nations with massive vaccination campaigns, loses a lot of its relevancy when each country has its own technical resources; when giant, transnational, economic actors dominate,  especially as concerns pharmaceuticals; and when the challenges of AIDS or even the re-appearance of malaria, require thinking simultaneously in economic, cultural, medical and political terms.  In this new context, the WHO could be an essential  forum for reflecting on public health policies, though this would require the guarantee of independent thought, for instance on the negative impact of the prohibitionist approach to drugs or on the evolution of national health policies.  This independence doesn’t exist however.

Another big risk inherent to institutions with sectoral specialisations is the fact that, at every level, they depend on technical bodies that have their own set of references and deliberate within an isolated context in which they’re only exposed to the judgement of their peers.   This problem can be observed, for example, in the patent community, which promotes the patenting of life, as well as in the organisations  that monitor nuclear energy.  Their sectoral approach appears particularly dangerous in view of the fact that the community of specialists is, in all complex technical and judicial fields, more and more influenced by giant economic groups that finance research and development and are the most important purveyors of highly technical jobs.  

The World Bank and the IMF are another example of the creation of communities of self-referencing specialists.  The specialists working in these institutions usually only deal with interlocutors that are their colleagues or that have been through the same institutions and exposed to the same school of thought.

International institutions highlight the difficulty of adapting to a transformed context without reforming mandates and structures.  For example, the World Bank and the IMF were originally tools of regulation created for the big states of the time: the first, to finance reconstruction in the countries that had coherent and long-established legal frameworks; the second, to maintain stable exchanges between major currencies.  Fifty years later they have become tools that rich countries use in their dealings with poor countries, even though this implies unilaterality and an absence of real legitimacy.

We encounter the same difficulty with the WTO, once known as the GATT.  What was once a contract between the participating parties has taken on so much importance and experienced so much success that its nature should change:  it is no longer the registrar of an agreement between parties of fairly equal force, it has become the producer of international law, but without providing the conditions of equity that such a right should entail.

The UN itself has often been overwhelmed by this transformation of context.  When, at the beginning, it had less than forty countries, a General Assembly of the countries, with the policy of one vote, one country, could really mean something.  But today there are more than two hundred countries, with differences in size and wealth as great as between the USA and Nepal;  most of these countries are infinitely weaker than the giant economic actors on the world scene.  And, not having sufficient control over the jungle of international rules, nor independent technical expertise, nor the ability to really influence the scientific and technological  evolutions that are transforming the world the General Assembly has lost all real ability to be influential.  As a result, it is the rich countries’ action and dialogue organisations that are playing a dominant role.  The economic globalisation they’ve imposed has weakened old state regulations without replacing them with new ones.  It has become a weapon in the hands of wealthy countries, discrediting the notion of world-wide regulation.

As far as the security apparatus is concerned, it was conceived to deal with situations of aggression of one country by another, i.e., situations of violation of sovereignty.  It has allowed for the legal deployment of armed troops in, for instance, Korea or the Gulf War.   It is inefficient however for dealing with the most bloody conflicts of our time, that take place within nations and effect primarily civilians.  The UN has systematically failed to prevent these crises, mainly because international relations have remained in the diplomatic realm, resulting in  the following consequences :  the absence of proper resources and means of quick intervention; the inability to act preventively despite this being the only efficient form of action; weak mandates; a multiform and poorly co-ordinated high command; the absence of credible political sanctions.  The right to intervene in internal affairs has progressed in the last few years but downstream from conflicts and without any global reflection.  Thus, international humanitarian intervention, where the state is present in disguise (more than half of the financing of humanitarian NGOs is public), allows public opinions to clear their conscience despite the fact that analysts agree that, in practice, intervention tends to keep the war effort going.  Humanitarian ideology, as its ties to the anti-UN campaign of American conservatives show, is an extension of the neo-liberal view of the world: the market of compassionate help to victims is a fashionable product that allows us to forgo putting into place a real world-wide security policy that would require dealing with causes rather than effects.

2- Current modes of regulation, that favour the most powerful actors, don’t give real legitimacy global governance.

Equity is one of governance’s primary conditions.  It can be most aptly defined as the possibility for the weakest to defend themselves against the most powerful by having their voice heard and their point of view represented. Unfortunately, the current international system isn’t equitable.  The absence of equity manifests itself through a succession of dissymetries. 

The first dissymmetry concerns the fixing of agendas.  Only the agenda of wealthy countries is taken into consideration in an efficient manner while the poorest countries must remain confined to deliberations that have no real significance.  When, at the 1992 Earth Summit, an assembly devoted to promoting sustainable development, the American president announced that the American way of life was not negotiable, this resulted in negotiations being broken off.  As long as what is considered acceptable or not for negotiation is determined by wealthy countries (with, for example, the free movement of goods: yes; the free movement of people: no; the conditions for the development of poor countries: yes; the possible undermining of the lifestyles of rich countries: no; negotiable permits for carbon monoxide: yes; the ownership of natural resources: no, etc.), world governance and its resulting constraints will only be accepted reluctantly by other countries.  As long as wealthy countries, often under the influence of their economic actors, assume the right to have a monopoly on concepts (for example, with the promotion of large-scale equipment or sophisticated technologies, at the expense of more socially beneficial solutions), other peoples will not feel concerned or even legally bound by agreements that their administrative and political elites may have negotiated in their name.

The second dissymmetry that can be observed is between actors.  Thus, the fields of energy, energy systems and international negotiations are dominated by companies, public as well as private, that are energy producers.  They are international and powerful.  They promote supply-side policies at the expense of their public service mission for the community.  The massive increase of production and consumption in the last fifty years having occurred without a parallel development of basic energy supplies for all, shows how the same policies perpetuate themselves at the expense of social justice and the conservation of natural resources.

The third dissymmetry can be observed at the level of the control of information systems.  This control contributes to the defining of those areas where international regulation is suggested or required.  The drug trade is a very good example of the control or the manipulation of information and its consequences.  Drugs are mostly picked out within the agricultural products of the Third World, unlike tobacco and alcohol.  As it happens, rich countries, and especially the USA, have forced on the whole world a prohibition of drugs, but not of tobacco and alcohol (though these are infinitely more dangerous to health then are “household products”).  Experience has shown how difficult it is to construct and channel more impartial information on this topic, with certain media being themselves dependent on information sources that are located in official institutions.  The connection between prohibition and the consolidation of mafias, between drugs, arms trafficking and the persistence of conflicts, between mafias and off-shore investment banks, has been commented on for many years but it has required the highlighting of international terrorist networks, following the attacks on New York and Washington, for the global community to consider taking action.

Finally, the fourth dissymmetry is apparent in the unequal treatment of countries, with treatment varying according to whether the countries are powerful or not.  The absence of implementation of UN resolutions when they concern the state of Israel has created a bitterness, a feeling of injustice that won’t disappear too soon.  The “clean war”, which is clean only for those that are on the side of technological weapons, has revealed by its very rhetoric a terrifying dissymmetry between the weight and the value of words, depending on which side you’re on.  In an apparently less dramatic manner, but with long-term consequences that are as disastrous for the very concept of global governance, the IMF and the World Bank have created deep feelings of injustice by forcing countries to adopt macro-economic measures that the share-holding countries don’t even adopt themselves. The call for a complete liberalisation of trade in agricultural products by countries that massively subsidise their own agriculture seems almost surrealistic.  Countries that wish to join the WTO are having to accept entry conditions that are harsher than those that were asked of past candidates.

These dissymetries weaken the legitimacy of current world governance.  The consequence : though everyone may be more or less conscious of the need for new world-wide regulations, we are far from any sort of unanimity as to the timeliness of their practical implementation, many fearing that the regulations are only designed to place poor countries under the tutelage of wealthy countries.  This leads to an additional difficulty : new initiative attract particular suspicion when they are called for by wealthy countries.

3-  Global governance can no longer be based on a fictional relationship between sovereign states.

The construction of independent states resulted in the multiplication of states considered to be sovereign and was based on the model of the nation-state inherited from 17th century Europe.  The rights of nations to self-determination was, as a result of this, linked to the idea of a right to an exclusive territory upon which the concerned nation could exercise full and total sovereignty.  But, aside from the undermining effect that the multiplication of countries would have on the UN, this utopia led to a multiplication of internal conflicts.  Most of the territories contain a myriad of peoples and the diversity of each community can often be observed at as low a level as the village, city or neighbourhood.   To suggest that only one level of power, that of the state, is important, can only lead to the breaking up of territories, as in the Balkans, to endless rivalries that concern one territory, as in Palestine and Israel, or to the multiplication of internal conflicts within each state.  The only possible response is both of a conceptual and  cultural nature.  Conceptual in that any governance, at whatever level, should work at insuring both the unity and the diversity of the community.  Cultural in that what guarantees the security of a country isn’t its homogeneous quality, but the learning of the culture of peace, i.e. the peaceful settlings of differences.

The fiction of sovereign states has kept the world community confined to diplomatic relations between states.  This has reinforced the representation of the world as a battleground for national interests.  Where national states should have been seen as a place where a multitude of contradicting interests confront one another, they were only seen as homogenous pseudo-communities, united by common interest and clashing with the selfish interests of others.

To arrive at a re-modelling of global governance, it is necessary, first of all, to examine fundamental concepts and ideologies within the current system.  It is a systems that centres global governance on the relations between national states, based on the ideology of the state that emerged in Europe in the 17th century, which in time became a model for the entire world.  International law itself is based on agreements between these states.

This concept of the state has the following characteristics :

•	state sovereignty is absolute ; states are only accountable to their own population.
•	a state coincides with a territory ; which means that their exists a correlation between a community and a territory circumscribed by borders.
•	the idea of “governance”, understood as the ability for human  societies to adopt systems of representation, institutions, rules, procedures, social bodies capable of self-regulation and peaceful management of their independent existences, is, in practice, reduced to the idea of government and public service.
•	the only foundations of international law are treaties between states.  They settle their differences either in a peaceful manner or with a war fought according to the “rules of war”.  As a result, international action is confined to some patching up.  It is a political layer that is superposed on national political orders and that can be considered of an inferior order.

It’s this conception of the state, its relevance with respect to today’s realities, that should be reconsidered.  It’s not that the national state won’t continue to play an important role in the future.  On the contrary, it should continue to incarnate the collective destiny of peoples and will certainly remain the main level for constructing social coherence as well as providing public service, for carrying out law and justice, for accomplishing redistribution and ensuring solidarity.  But it will remain a state conceived, according to unique principles, as a level in governance: an essential level, but ultimately a level among other levels, with supranational and infranational bodies. 

As a result of this, it isn’t possible to envisage an architecture for global governance without effecting a re-modelling of the nation-states themselves, without redefining their roles, their operational modes, and their links to other political orders.

Current global governance is also suffering as a result of its fundamental actors, states, being themselves in a state of crisis.   No-one can seriously consider that, at the global level, global governance is based on relations between virtuous states that, in the name of public welfare, impose constraints on private actors that are only guided by self-interest.

In more visual terms, imagine a governance built with state bricks where, not only the architecture proves obsolete, but where the bricks themselves are crumbling.   Many states, unfortunately, have proved to be inefficient, corrupt and authoritarian.  This has resulted in a paradox: the World Bank negotiates the dismantling of the states that it loans money to.  Not having worked out another philosophy for states nor initiated their reform we have programmed their demise with, as a consequence, a greater weakening of global governance itself.

For too long the debate on the nature of states was purely ideological.  To criticise the functioning of a state in order to reform it and make it stronger was considered to be motivated by an anti-state bias.  However, to give up reforming amounted to allowing the adversary to have the monopoly of reform!  As a result, until only recently, the vision of “good governance”, in the form in which it was promoted by international financial institutions, was that of a state to a great extent open to the internationalisation of markets.  This dogmatic bias contributed to the discrediting of the notion of governance itself, at a moment when better governance was urgently needed.

4-  A new architecture is necessary

Retreating within one’s national borders is tempting but illusive.  The tragic terrorist attacks in New York and Washington reminds us that no country, not even the most powerful, can dream of returning to a past order.  The very idea that the management of the world can be pursued through diplomatic relations between national sovereign states is outdated.  The planet has become, for better and for worse, our shared home, a domestic expanse that encompasses a global community that remains to be invented and constructed.

Adaptations at the peripheries of current institutions aren’t extensive enough to measure up to the scale of problems.  However, destroying these institutions and existing regulations because of their inadequacies would be the worst solution.  On the contrary, it is a re-modelling, the creation of a new architecture for global governance that is needed.  This proposals booklet’s ambition is to identify a few paths that point in this direction.

The method used to draw up these proposals is built first on what we’ve discussed : a new architecture for global governance can’t come to the fore without a new philosophy of governance that can also be applied to the other levels of governance.

The method then is rooted in the fact that governance isn’t an abstract speculative theory but rather the fruit of practices that, little by little, react to one another so that there emerges a formulation of general principles that, in turn, serve as a model framework for elaborating new policies.  Consequently, the designing of a new architecture is necessarily the fruit of a perpetual see-saw action with, on one hand, a partial approach based on the observation of responses to concrete challenges at different levels, in different regions of the world and in different fields, and, on the other, a global approach based on the pooling of these observations.

The principles of global  governance are common to all levels of governance.

The field of activity approach  has allowed us to benefit from the Alliance proposals booklets in  a vast amount of fields : 
•	The management of the relations between humankind and the biosphere (water, soils, energy, forests, industrial ecology, agrarian reform, education and the environment).
•	The management of knowledge (the sciences, new technologies and information, genetically modified organisms, the patenting of the living world).
•	The management of exchanges (economic solidarity, trade, finance, international financial institutions).
•	Security (humanitarian aid, drugs and organised crime, arms conversion).

In most of these fields, establishing new world-wide regulations appears to be an important issue, usually associated with regulations to be elaborated at other levels.  The proposals that follow are, whenever possible, illustrated with concrete examples in this or that field.

Chapter I :  Establishing a legitimate global governance

In order to build the foundations of a legitimate global governance, it is necessary to assign it objectives that have constitutional value, that root it in clear ethical foundations and that contain the conditions of its legitimacy.

1- The international community must agree on shared objectives.

In a world that is overrun by a feeling of chaos, or even absurdity, where ever-growing numbers of individuals and peoples have the feeling that they’re on a lost boat, without  navigator nor map, blown here and there by the powerful winds of science and market forces, tossed here and there by contradictory interests, thrown on the course of ecological and political crises, whether they be ecological or political. A boat whose first class section contains only a small minority and whose enormous holds are piled up with the planet’s majorities.  The first priority of global governance is for the peoples of the earth to share the same feeling of having a common destiny.

We see all too well, with the terrorism that has shaken American, the exacerbation of cultural identity crises, an illusory struggle between good, which everyone thinks they represent, and evil, represented by the peculiar “other”.  It has therefore become urgent to formulate common objectives for global governance and to make them its constitutional foundation.  We need solemn locations to proclaim these objectives.  The General Assembly of the United Nations, that brings together the representatives of states, isn’t adequate.

These objectives rest on a shared analysis :  that we share one unique planet.  Our fates, within humankind, are permanently intertwined.  The happiness of each individual depends on the well-being of all individuals.  What affects human beings on the other side of the earth affects me, a member of the same human family.  The frustrations of a people has consequences that touch other peoples.  The lifestyle of one society has an influence on the lifestyle of other societies.  Thus, the first objective of governance is to learn to live together and peacefully manage our shared home ; to guarantee the conditions of survival, of peace, and of a harmonious balance between humankind and the biosphere.  The first objective is to define new relations between human beings, between societies and between humankind and the biosphere.

By asserting that it shares a common home as well as a common dependence on the whole living world, of which it is a part and to which it is irrevocably linked, humankind recognises that the planet is a domestic space,  a space that is a shared home with a form of management that requires more than diplomatic relations between states.

Proposal 1    The constitutional expression of global governance objectives.

Concerning international institutions, these general objectives can be broken down into three goals : sustainable development; the curbing of inequalities; the building of peace in a world of diversity.

Establishing the conditions for sustainable development

The history and destiny of humankind are more important than  the immediate interests of a person, of people or of all humankind.  The first duty of governance is to preserve the long term.  The current mode of development has created fundamental disequilibriums between humankind and the biosphere.  This imbalance has put the lives of our children and grandchildren at risk.  Hence, the first common objective is to transform current models of development and make them compatible in the long-term with the limited resources of the biosphere.  Material development should be secondary to human development.  Already years ago, Ghandi reminded us that the planet could the provide for the needs but not for the greed of all humankind.  The future of humankind is only insured if the concern for the complete development of human beings - spiritual development, intellectual, social, artistic, etc. – becomes the foremost criteria for development.  Material development should first satisfy the basic conditions for human dignity and well-being.  There are enough scientific, technological, managerial and creative resources on this planet to manage this.

Curbing inequalities

Sustainable development can’t be arrived at by allotting the planet’s limited resources to a small minority that has the economic means to acquire them and the military means to hold on to them.  The tragic events of the year 2001 have shown us that while frustrations have been accumulating in poor urban areas, there are no countries or continents that can provide sanctuary for anyone.  Thus, the curbing of inequalities is not only a moral duty or an act of compassion.  It is also a duty of justice and a condition for long-term peace.  Finding ways to ensure the liberty of all and the respect for everyone’s humanity is the second objective of global governance.

Establishing a lasting peace while respecting diversity

Ecological and cultural diversity aren’t only unavoidable realities of today’s world but also a major source of wealth for humankind.  Peace requires acknowledging that we belong to the same family, searching for the common good while remaining conscious of the fact that humankind, from the smallest communities to the entire human family, is united.  At each level of governance, it is necessary to guarantee more unity as well as more diversity.  It is our ability not to oppose unity and diversity, but rather to consider them as being two faces of the same coin that constitutes, from the management of a neighbourhood or a village to global management, the art of governance.  It is this art that global governance must practice at the global level and at other levels.  

2- The international community must agree on common ethical foundations.

After the trauma of World War II, global governance wouldn’t have seen the day if two linked foundations, two pillars, hadn’t emerged :  the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even though the United Nations Charter’s original conception, that of a dialogue between the peoples of the Earth, was replaced by a dialogue between states; and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was, just as the Charter was, established by the victorious parties of World War II and rooted in the values of the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, these two pillars have for the last fifty years permitted a slow and painstaking, but genuine, building of portions of global governance.   The consciousness of the interdependency of peoples on Earth could gradually emerge.  The notion of crimes against humanity authorised a certain form of intervention in the affairs of states and recently was the inspiration for the creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC).  Concerning human rights:  though they were primarily political rights originally, they came to also concern the notion of human dignity and the related social, economic and cultural rights.

The United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are two examples that show that shared philosophical and ethical foundations can indeed pave the way for the gradual building of an institutional, political and judicial framework.

For international rules to be efficient and attract full-hearted support, it is necessary for them to be deeply appealing and, for this to be true, these rules must be in harmony with the values that guide people’s conduct.  It is necessary for general principles of collective action  (the source of laws) and ethical orientations (the source of individual conduct) to be in conformity.

Following a long process of cross-cultural dialogue – inside and outside the Alliance – and after having examined the many contributions that were made at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit concerning the issue of universal ethics, it became clear to us that the central principle, the mainspring of the third pillar of international life, should be responsibility.  Clearly the development of human abilities and the growing impact that human beings are having on the biosphere has profoundly transformed the very notion of responsibility.  As a result, this notion has taken on a new dimension.  It no longer concerns only our explicit intentions, it has also extended to the impact, voluntary or not, of our actions, however far away they may be carried out.  To the extent that a number of human activities, seemingly trivial, such as driving one’s car, can have a devastating effect, on climate change for instance, responsibility must be considered not  just in terms of the individual but also in terms of the community.  The idea that our liberty and rights are linked to responsibilities to our neighbour and to all of humanity, and the living world as well, is an ethical principle that is simply common sense and is, thus, accepted by all civilisations.  At the initiative of the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the theologian Hans Küng, the Interaction Council  has brought together, during the 1990s, ex-heads of governments.  This council also concluded that universal ethics should be rooted in the notion of responsibility.

Proposal 2	Making the Human Responsibilities Charter the third constitutional pillar of the international community.

We propose to make the Human Responsibilities Charter the third pillar of the international community.  Its initiative should be taken by civil society.  It could be taken, in particular, by respected figures within the various families of religious and philosophical thought.  

The Charter defines the forms of responsibility :

	Growing interdependence between individuals, between societies, and between human beings and nature reinforces the effects of the behaviour of individuals and human groups on their social and natural environment, be it close or far away.

	This situation provides each and every one of us with new opportunities for playing a role in meeting the new challenges that humankind must face : each human being has the ability to take on his/her responsibilities; even when people feel helpless, they still have the possibility to join others and create a collective force.

	While most human beings can claim to be endowed with basic rights, their responsibilities are directly proportional to the opportunities  available to them.  The more liberty a person has, the more access to information, knowledge, wealth and power, the more he/she has the ability to fulfil responsibilities and the duty to account for his/her acts.

	The responsibilities apply not only to present and future actions, but also to past actions. A group of individuals should be held morally accountable for past damages, and concrete reparations should be accomplished to the extent that is possible.

	Insofar as we only have a partial awareness of the consequences of our actions now and in the future, our responsibility requires that we also act with the greatest humility, and that we display prudence and caution.”

This extended definition of responsibility has, for world leaders and for the international community, immediate consequences :

•	World leaders and major economic actors are held accountable for their acts, not just to their electors or their shareholders, but also to all those that their acts have an impact on, be it positive or negative;
•	A distinction is henceforth made between representatives and their constituencies.  This distinction is essential, for instance, when it comes to dealing with the international debt.  We can’t punish constituencies if we consider that the representatives have been irresponsible.  Only the quality of the ties between the representative and his/her constituency, that is to say, only a well-informed constituency within a real democracy, can be considered responsible for the acts of the representative.  This should eliminate, for instance, the need for a people to reimburse the debts of a dictator or punishing an entire population, as is the case with embargoes and sanctions that only really concern the representatives;
•	All forms of sovereignty are henceforth more limited.  From the moment that the acts of  leaders have an impact on their own peoples, they should be held accountable before their own fellow citizens as well as the international bodies that are in charge of representing the rest of the world.
•	The notion of a private party associating in a court action with a public prosecutor in state legal frameworks is firmly established in international law and extended to all the situations where a population cannot hold their own leaders to accountability or when the impact of the acts of leaders reaches beyond the population.

Proposal 3   Establishing a hierarchy of norms and rules, common to all international institutions.

This hierarchy is presently inefficient.  Each multilateral institution, whether it be international institutions (IMF or World Bank) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) or United Nations agencies, has its own rules, norms and priorities that are linked to their mandate.  Even the WTO, whose preamble refers to sustainable development, has for sole mission the development of international trade.  All those that point to the contradictions between the development of international trade and environmental protection are faced with a dilemma:  either we extend the mandate of the WTO to have it encompass environmental issues despite the risk of the environment being treated like a piece of merchandise, to be controlled by market forces ; or we elaborate international environmental rules that temper the rules of international trade.  But this will maintain an unbalanced rivalry as the WTO disposes of a regulation mechanism for conflicts that brings concrete efficiency to its rules, whereas institutions devoted to environmental conservation aren’t endowed with efficient mechanisms allowing them to execute decisions taken at an international level.

By endowing global governance with common objectives and a common responsibility principle, the actions carried out by each institution are respectful of common principles whose constitutional value transcends the institutions’ mandates in the same way that a national state’s constitutional principles and the preamble to its constitution have a value that has more weight than laws or decrees.

3- The international community should define, within the Charter, the areas of legitimate intervention.

The Charter also defines the principles that are applied to responsibility.  Thus, it proposes seven principles to which are attached seven fields of application for the responsibility principle :

•	“The quest for peace entails the establishing of justice.
•	To protect one’s own liberty and dignity, each individual must fight for the liberty and dignity of others.
•	In decisions concerning short-term needs and priorities we must anticipate and take into account their long-term impact and, if this is impossible, opt for prudence and wariness.
•	We must seek a balance between the satisfaction of human needs and the protection of the natural environment.
•	We must not seek economic prosperity without trying to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth.  Market mechanisms should be regulated so that they serve the well-being and development of all human beings.
•	Material development, research and innovation should be oriented to serve human development and the preservation of our planet.
•	In our quest for the unity needed to meet coming challenges, we must preserve the   potential for renewal and innovation that cultural diversity offers.”

Proposal 4  A Human Responsibilities Charter for defining global governance’s fields of areas of intervention.

The Charter and its seven principles of application should define the legitimate field of intervention by global governance.  The first principle brings together peace and justice.  Though it is easy to state that, in principle, peace and justice are inseparable and that peace can’t be maintained without bringing an equitable solution to conflicts, in practice these principles are often contradictory and the prosecution of violence often results in each of the conflicting parties being convinced that justice has not been done.  The international community, in its quest to bring peace and justice to the world, can’t be limited to interposing itself between the conflicting parties.  It must develop a genuine art of peace, that is to say, an art of methods of dialogue, negotiation, mediation and reconstruction of societies.  In diplomatic relations between peoples, peace has often, in the past, been defined as an interval between wars.  In the same way that a global community can invent its own rules of management for the shared home, it must invent, even progressively impose through successive jurisprudences, methods for the re-establishment of a just peace.

The second principle subordinates exercising one’s liberty to the preservation of the human dignity and basic rights of others.  Liberty shouldn’t be exercised at the expense of our environment’s ability to maintain life.  This principle is the main reference for the evaluation of international agreements, state or private actor’s actions.  It can, for instance, be used to attack a multilateral agreement on investments that, in order to guarantee the security of foreign investments in a country, can prove to be contrary to labour rights and the protection of the environment.  The security of investments and the protection of the environment aren’t necessarily contradictory.  A principle like this one simply makes it necessary for there to exist a balance between these two conditions.  Similarly, a structural adjustment plan pursues legitimate objectives when it provides loans on the condition that they receive reasonable guarantees of their repayment. However, the legitimacy of these guarantees exists only within the limits of respect for human dignity and the protection of the environment.

The third principle concerns the duty to protect the future.  The international community is the most important representative of the rights of future generations.  In the balance between the short-term and the long-term, the world-wide community should be capable of making sure that the acceleration of innovations and evolutions doesn’t undermine societies’ ability to preserve their completeness.  Human beings dispose of methods of regulation that allow them  to both receive elements from outside, thus assuring their regeneration and the ability to adapt, and to filter these elements, some of which are destructive.  The world-wide community must guarantee this regulation and permit each society to apply it themselves.  The right for communities to choose what is good for them and refuse what is potentially destructive is an essential part of future international law.  This third principle also defines the role of the international community in the preservation of the common good, extended to life in its entirety.

The fourth principle concerns the distribution of human and material resources.  It entails duties of distribution and redistribution, in particular of rare goods.  

The duty to apply justice in the distribution of natural resources leads to the question of wealthy countries’ debt to other countries as a result of their past consumption of the natural resources that can be regarded as fundamental common goods.

The fifth and sixth principles underline the subordination of market mechanisms and material development to the well-being and development of all human beings.  They impose a definition of human development that isn’t limited to material development.  They fix in law the duty to evaluate the real contribution of the market or technological development in terms of transcendent human objectives.  With the formidable means of development that are the market, science and technological development having had a tendency to become ends in themselves, it must be restated with force that they are subordinated to other objectives and should be evaluated with respect to these.  These same principles also entrust the international community with the duty of supporting the promotion of human development and, in particular, the promotion of all the goods that are multiplied and shared : understanding, experience, etc.  

The seventh principle, finally, links diversity and unity.  A developed humanity is a humanity that is united yet enriched by the diversity of its components.  What is true of all living systems is true of humanity : their internal diversity and the wealth of the relations between their parts are an indicator of their quality and the guarantee of their abilities to adapt.  Far from being contradictory, the construction of a world-wide community and the right for each community to preserve its own specificities mutually strengthen one another.  The diversity of living systems, biodiversity and the diversity of human cultures should be put on the same level and their conservation is one of the duties of the world-wide community.

4- Global governance must embrace the conditions of legitimacy.

The legitimacy of governance depends on the general impression that political and administrative power are held by “the right” people, according to “good” practices and the common good.  For governance to be legitimate it must meet three conditions : it must be responsive to the real needs of a community ; authority must be in the hands of individuals worthy of trust ; each community member should be treated in an equitable manner.

The first condition of legitimacy : governance must be responsive to the real needs of the community.

Governance, which can be looked upon as a set of constraints, can only be accepted and desired if it clearly deals with common challenges, requiring the co-operation of all and efficient action.  These challenges, shared by all multilateral agencies, should be limited in number. The need for transnational co-operation should be apparent, the need for the co-operation of actors should be clearly established.  The conditions for efficient action should be met : the spelling out of objectives without the means of achieving them will only lead to a deep mistrust of governance ; the will to tackle problems will be met with disbelief.

Proposal 5   Fixing “ the great global causes ” that are within the scope of global policies carried out by all agencies.

From health or housing policies to education, from agriculture to soil, from economic development policies to environmental protection, the issues that deserve to be subjects of debate between peoples and societies are countless.  All of them can benefit from shared initiatives and can lead to the elaboration of common guiding principles.  They nevertheless remain local policies for which normative action on the part of international institutions isn’t justified.  Certain big challenges, however, can’t be met without the co-operation of all, whether it be because of their urgency, their systemic nature or the interdependencies of actions needing to be carried out.

They constitute the great world causes.  These should :  be identified in a limited list (less than ten) ; be presented in a systemic manner by showing the necessarily co-operative nature of their solutions ; be shared by multilateral institutions ; ask for contributions from all public and private actors ; be provided with a clearly defined budget serving as an incentive and, attached to the Office of Secretary-General, distributed to all the actors according to the extent of their implication ; provide valuable lessons in co-operation between different sorts of actors.

An exceptional consulting procedure, encompassing parliaments, public opinion and civil society, should, at regular intervals, every seven years for example, allow for a  revision of the great global causes.  The following constitutes examples of “ great causes ” : AIDS ; the priorities of science and innovation ; water, in particular, big transnational waterways ; security ; converting war-time economies to peace-time economies and terrorism ; the regulation of financial markets and currencies ; global warning ; biodiversity and the preservation of global common goods ; economy of crime.

Proposal 6	Presenting an annual report on the state of the world.

There exist a number of regular reports, both public, such as those of the UNDP or the WHO, and private, such as those that concern the environment (World Watch Institute), human rights (Amnesty International), corruption (Transparency International), etc.   They are all useful.  However their abundance makes it difficult to arrive at a broad understanding.  A solemn report on the state of the world can be presented each year by the Secretary General of the United Nations.  It will provide a summary of the progress of the constitutional objectives of the International community, of the state of progress of the policies that concern great global causes, and will propose future priorities.

Second condition of legitimacy : each person should be treated in an equitable manner.

Governance loses its legitimacy if it is a mirror of the imbalance of power.  The very function of law, in particular international law, is to defend the interests of the weak.  The current absence of equity, manifest in a series of imbalances profitable to the most powerful actors, is a major cause of the current crisis of global governance. The proposals that follow are designed to bring about greater balance.

Proposal 7	Creating a democratic framework for fixing international agendas.

Two systems currently dominate the international scene.  Both are deeply unsatisfying : the UN system, that provides a seat for each independent state and thus gives what appears to be an important share of power to small states without means or influence ; the systems where the political weight of a country is proportionate to its wealth.  The latter include the institutions of Bretton Woods and the bodies, formal or informal, that represent wealthy countries – the OECD, the Big 8, NATO, the World Energy Commission, the “ patent community ”, etc.   They have dominated the international scene since the demise of the soviet bloc.  This demise resulted in depreciated interest in the small countries that once could set a price for their allegiance to one or the other of the two blocs.

As a result, the agenda of issues for international negotiation, the nature of the concepts involved and the fixing of priorities is dominated mainly by a small group of Western countries, in particular the USA and, to a lesser extent, the European Union.

However, world conferences on higher education (1998) and science (1999), organised by UNESCO, have demonstrated that regional preparatory conferences were much richer than the world conferences themselves.  A preliminary regional project would considerably enrich the agenda of these types of negotiations.

The best procedure for the different regions of the world (that we’ll define further on) would be to allow them, at regular intervals, to present the international community their priorities for the period to come.  A voting procedure for delegates of the different regions, after a possible grouping of themes and according to a weighting of votes that remains to be determined, would make it possible to define an agenda for the international community for the period to come.

Proposal 8	Guaranteeing the fairness of treatment and sanctions in all international agreements.

International financial institutions (IMF, World Bank) and the WTO (World Trade Organisation) are two particularly interesting examples of agreements between parties.  The first with their vocation of providing loans that no country is in theory obliged to seek or accept ; the second because it is responsible for a myriad of rules to which states comply of their own free will.  In practice, however, the generalisation of countries’ participation in these agreements has changed their nature.  The situation calls for the elaboration of a contract law that incorporates a few principles of equity :

•	Equity in treatment.  Example :  it isn’t possible to force a poor country to adopt a discipline, a macro-economic discipline for instance, that wealthy countries, in particular the USA, don’t impose upon themselves ; it isn’t possible to ask that new members of the WTO give up protecting their agriculture when Europe and the USA drown the world in subsidised agricultural products.
•	Equity in sanctions.  Examples :  Within the framework of international financial institutions : it isn’t possible to place the burden of sanctions on a third party ; sanctions should penalise in an equitable manner the failings of the parties.  Sanctions should be limited in time.  Sanctions should be commensurate with damages incurred.  This simple rule has multiple consequences.  First of all, it makes it impossible to place the burden of a sanction on the poor population of a poor country for debts contracted in its name (in the case of debt).  It is also impossible to make the population of poor countries pay for imprudent acts when responsibility is equally shared between economic and financial actors of rich countries and those of poor countries (in the case of the Asian financial crisis).  In order to limit the time span of a sanction, mechanisms designed to make a “ bankruptcy warning ” that halts the indefinite deferment of the debt (in the case of debt).  The damages incurred by banks and states due to default should be dealt with in the same way as the reimbursement of creditors in the event of the bankruptcy of a private operator.  The damages incurred by banks and lender states resulting from default on debt should be evaluated and put into perspective by considering the damages that populations of poor countries have suffered as a result of the execution of poorly conceived structural adjustment plans.															  Within the framework of the WTO :  equity demands that sanctions for non-compliance with rules be a dissuasive tool for the most powerful countries as well.  This isn’t yet the case, as the WTO shows : poor countries don’t have the means to know or master the complex rules nor finance contentious actions and, even if they do win their case, they can’t implement effective sanctions against an economically powerful country since sanctions are only effective when applied by all countries rather than just by the injured party.
•	Equity of accepted sacrifices.  Examples : in the Asian, Russian, Mexican and Brazilian crises, from 1997 to 1998, the countries of the OECD had their share of responsibility.  In response to the “ systemic risk ” brought about by these crises, the IMF, with the backing of the governments of the countries directly affected, imposed excessively severe measures.  These measures were useful for preventing the crisis from spreading to Western financial markets.  However, so as to protect the financial operators of wealthy countries from the effects of their imprudence, we forced populations of countries in crisis to make considerable sacrifices.   If even the smallest of these sacrifices had been asked of the societies of Europe and the United States as a price for the continued existence of the financial system, the system would have been reformed long ago.  An international procedure should be created in order to define this balance of sacrifices.

Proposal 9	Creating an independent international institution for advising and supporting the weakest actors.

In the fight against social misery, the existence of universal rights isn’t enough.  The poor must at least know their rights in order to begin to defend them.  This is why we refer to the right of access to law.  This notion can easily be transposed to the international context.  Example :  in international trade we observe not only a dissymmetry between rich and poor countries with regard to information access, but also with regard to the price of contentious procedures.   Equity demands that we provide an international network of advice, independent but financed in part by the international community, that the poorest countries and community members can lean on and use to know and defend their rights.

The third condition for legitimacy :  authority must be in the hands of persons worthy of trust.

The responsibility principle is based in law and can lead to legal sanctions against governments.  In this regard, the notion of crime against humanity and the recent creation of the ICC represent important advances.  However, these innovations concern exceptional situations and usually result in cumbersome procedures.  The application of the responsibility principle must have a myriad of mechanisms at its disposal.   Solutions don’t have to take the form of judgements and sanctions, as the reconciliation processes that have followed dictatorships show.  “ Truth commissions ” show how important it is for victims to obtain the acknowledgement of the wrongs they have suffered and to see the persons responsible for their plight identified.  The issues of sanction, pardon and rehabilitation come afterwards.

Proposal 10  Conditions for the responsibility of agents of international institutions.    

A large proportion of the powers within global governance are in the hands of bodies of civil servants and experts who often have extensive autonomy in decision-making.  This is due to the fact that the issues they deal with are complex and the competent political bodies are weak, distant and divided.  These civil servants and experts have to accept responsibilities commensurate with their power and be given the means to respect these responsibilities.  This implies, in particular :

•	The transparency of decision-making procedures.
•	The existence of recourse.  Source and recourse should be identified for any international rule that is transposed on a national level.
•	The transparency of financial sources and of the institutional dependence of international institutions on experts.  The fact that the WTO receives public funding and private funding that is allocated to priorities fixed by the donors makes the issue of transparency all the more important.
•	The hierarchy of loyalties. It is the human counterpart to the hierarchy of norms and rules in an institutional model.  The duty to follow orders, as well as the confidentiality principle, that makes it a duty for all representatives of international public service not to disclose internal information, should be considered subordinate to other duties, for instance the duty to inform the public so as to allow for real debate.
•	The possibility to challenge the personal responsibility of agents of the public domain. This is valid, in particular, for those that represent states in international decisions.
•	The establishing of mandatory training sessions for all experts and agents of multilateral institutions.  These sessions should permit the objectivisation of current ideologies within the environments and institutions that these individuals come from.  This requirement is essential for all experts, scientists, economists, financial experts and administrators whose initial training rarely contains the history of science, ethics, the methods of critical thinking, the acquisition of the ability to exchange ideas with members of other fields.
•	Accounting for one’s actions.  The obligation to publicly justify one’s actions should be applicable in particular to those civil servants who represent countries in multilateral institutions.  They must account for the actions taken within the scope of their mandate to national parliaments and public opinion.

Chapter II :   Establishing a global democratic community

1- The creation of a global community should reflect society’s diversity.

Governance in a society is the art of establishing all the necessary regulations for maintaining peace, protecting future generations and ensuring human development.  Democracy is a regime in which each person has a role in the management of a community and in choosing a common destiny.  

This ability to regulate and control rests, at every level of governance, on four principles:

•	To exist, a community must constitute itself and recognise a shared destiny.  Each member of a community must acknowledge his/her citizenship and the power and responsibility that ensue.
•	A community cannot allow itself to be controlled by obtuse rationales.  It knows how to use its resources, whatever they may be, to pursue objectives.  Market forces, in particular, are assigned the status they deserve.
•	The goal of governance, a system for regulating society, is to know and master patterns of trade within society and, especially, between a society and the rest of the world : other societies, the biosphere.
•	Governance is the art of managing the long-term and demonstrating foresight.  It should ensure both the stability and cohesion of  the system, in the short term, and its evolution in the long term.

These principles are even more important with regard to the building of global governance.  For global governance isn’t really established, nor are conditions for democracy present.  Globalisation is often limited to economic globalisation and commercial exchanges have filtered into every part of life, and, meanwhile, independent information systems on the state of the planet still don’t exist; humankind still knows very little about its relations with the biosphere and isn’t equipped itself with the tools for carrying out long-term action.

Today, almost all communities, local and global, are diverse, and governance must both guarantee unity and protect and celebrate diversity.  This idea is also true at the global level.  The emergence of a democratic global community can’t be achieved if we reject differences.  On the contrary, it can be achieved only through the recognition and protection of diversities.  It should focus on a dialogue between communities united by common values and objectives.

The diversity of global society has several dimensions.  Global governance being limited today to relations between states, we tend to only see diversity from one angle :   geo-cultural diversity.  We thus live in a fictional world where national interests and vast civilisations clash.  This simplistic vision of the world leads to war : war over the appropriation of natural resources or the imagined “clash of civilisations”.  Not to mention the fact that disparities hinder real dialogue between states.

In the current world, where we witness innumerable interdependencies and exchanges and  greater and greater inequality within each society with regard to access to knowledge and wealth, another sort of diversity is making headway, that of social and professional milieus.  The role played by women in managing the world and the recognition of their specific contributions in the spheres of politics, the economy, and the environment, are perhaps more important than considering whether they are English, Iranian or Chinese.  The rural world has its own contributions, its own challenges, its own global vision with regard to its relationship to the Earth, the environment, trade, science, urban society.  Company executives, particularly those of big companies, are part of a community with a vision of the world.  Their concerns and, often, their backgrounds, bring them close to one another, but are possibly very distant form those of the unemployed at their doorsteps.  Scientists of the same field often behave like a community but without important ties to other fields and the rest of society.  World society tends to be organised in the same way as organ pipes, with milieus within which communication is organised on a global scale but where there’s no communication with other milieus.

The building of a democratic global community requires taking five big initiatives that are intertwined :  the establishing of regional communities, the establishing of collegial communities, the creation of a world parliament, the holding of a planetary constitutional assembly and the creation of a world tax system.

In each case, the fundamental idea, common to all levels of governance, is the same :  a community isn’t decreed, it constitutes itself, namely by inventing its own rules.

2- It is essential to back the emergence of regional and intermediary levels situated between states and the world.

Establishing a united global government is neither imaginable nor desirable.  It is therefore necessary to develop, just as states have done, several levels of governance,  from the world level to the local level.  Most states, centralised and federal are themselves subdivided into provinces, cities, primary communities.  What is missing today as we attempt to build democratic global governance, is an intermediate level between small states and the planet: the level of world regions.  Certain states are regions in themselves : China and India in particular.  Others represent the essential part of a region by their size and demographic weight :  the USA in North America, Indonesia in South-East Asia, Nigeria in West Africa, Russia in Eurasia.  As experiences in governance have shown, establishing a balanced dialogue between territorial entities requires having  less than twenty entities at a given level.  This is what allows for a real dialogue between all members.  It is therefore necessary to establish as quickly as possible a small number of regional communities that can be, if not equal, at least partners in a real dialogue with the most powerful communities.

The building of the European Union over the last fifty years is, if not a model, at the very least an example of the most complete establishment of a regional community.  In different places in the world, parallel to the breaking up of pseudo united groupings, built under constraint, such as the ex European colonies, the USSR or even Yugoslavia, we have witnessed, with the liberalisation of international trade, the building of economic and social regional sub groupings :  Mercosur in Latin America, NAFTA in North America, ASEAN in Asia, etc.  Far from being an obstacle to trade, these sub groupings prepare an extension of trade with the rest of the world by consolidating the set of rules necessary for free trade within their own borders.  But, with the exception of the European Union, these free trade entities don’t establish real regional communities.  They aren’t opposed to such establishments and perhaps they prefigure them, but they aren’t sufficient in themselves.  Genuine regional communities must be established through both an upward and downward movement.

Proposal 11	    Establishing regional communities.

Firstly,  the creation of regional communities follows an upward movement.

Political initiatives (alliance treaties, parliamentary bodies) and economic ones (liberalisation of trade) aren’t enough.  Civil society initiatives are essential if a community is to progressively become conscious of itself.

This building process must be based on the fact that representative democracy is far from being the only means to achieve community.  Concerning water management, for instance, public debate forums, providing a setting for deliberating on a shared problem, prove to be more efficient at achieving integrated management of resources than a delegation of power.  On the contrary, in regions with strong ethnic identities such as Africa, the multiparty system has sometimes led to an exacerbation of tension, with each ethnic group attempting to monopolise power.

The recent development on the internet of “virtual communities” shows that the defining of common game rules contributes to the creation of a community.  We can encourage the emergence of regional communities by just such a method,  setting a rule that countries must group together into regional communities of more than one hundred million inhabitants.  This was exactly the rule applied to the World Citizens Assembly at Lille in December 2001 and it led to the definition of precisely twenty world regions.  This system of territorial groupings does have some problems, most notably in the case of Israel.  In these cases a country should be allowed to attach itself to another regional grouping, even if there is no geographical connection.

In these regional groupings we will facilitate the establishing of human networks that are defined by specific interests and professional and social milieus.  Experience has shown that these sorts of networks develop work habits, methods of discussion and collective deliberation (through consensus building rather than voting), a habit of defining game rules (work methods, communication and information systems, the identifying of themes of common interest, dealing with conflict and disagreements) that contribute to the creation of a human community.

Deliberating together on the methods of dealing with themes of common interest – the great global causes for instance – also contributes to the creation of a community.  In 2004, in each of the world regions, a founding Congress bringing together people from all milieus will provide the setting to begin discussing a common Charter, a prelude to a constitution, and to define the organisation of future meetings of a regional constitutional assembly.

Now we can see how the creation of regional communities follows a downward movement as well.

To accelerate the creation of regional sub-groupings, three mechanisms must be implemented :

•	Within various agencies and international institutions the representation process must be based explicitly on regional groupings, with each representative being answerable to the country of his/her region.
•	The negotiation and decision processes should favour this regional level.  This is true particularly with regard to the unavoidable reform of the Security Council.  It should become a directory containing representatives from world regions.  With a rotation system, each country within a region would have its turn as president and as a representative in international negotiations.  Concerted European action in such negotiations already illustrates the principle.
•	Within the framework of those essential principles formulated at a world level, a set of rules of international law should, in conformity with the principle of active subsidiarity, be formulated at the regional level.

3- Global governance should guarantee the representation of the points of view of different milieus.

How can each social and professional milieu be represented in global governance?  And how does one go about building a dialogue between different milieus?

There exists a classic response to this question at the national as well as the international levels :  the creation of economic and social Councils or Committees.  These committees, however, are limited in two ways.  First of all, they favour two actors : companies and unions.  The committees often are a transposition of companies’ management on a wider scale: that of a province, a state, the European Union or the UN.

This representation isn’t adapted to countries where big companies don’t structure economic and social life and where informal and rural economies remain dominant.  Also, it leaves other economic actors of society in the dark : in the European Union, for example, these other actors are relegated to a group that is supposed to represent non-profit associations.  

Another limit inherent to this type of structure is the favouring of so-called representative  organisations.  In practice, they are federations of federations of employers or federations of federations of unions. This favouritism, understandable in a context where representative democracy is dominant, nevertheless tends to weaken the moral authority and the political weight of this sort of structure.  It’s rare to see real leaders actively participate, and the representatives of the various social and economic actors aren’t there to make important decisions in the name of their milieus.  As a result, we end up with consultative organs, interesting perhaps but incapable of representing society in its diversity and the vast concerns of civil society.

This will to represent the diverse milieus within society also appeared within the United Nations with the  emergence of non-governmental organisations that received accreditations from different agencies.  Whether these NGOs concern housing, the environment, human rights or even trade, they allow the multilateral agencies to partially avoid direct relations with states and have better means of understanding the reactions of society at their root.  Thus, in a sometimes organised and more often in a spontaneous and rebellious manner, the big international conferences of the last decade, Rio, Beijing, Vienna, Cairo, Istanbul, have been characterised by the holding of big NGO forums, outside of the official conferences and with a greater and greater will to influence the conferences’ decisions.  With Seattle in 1999 a new ritual appeared :  protest marches that rejected the mechanisms of global governance rather than trying to influence them in the sidelines.  From Göteborg to Genoa,  in 2001 these protests became bigger and bigger and, inevitably, were infiltrated by violent groups.

The third generation of this vast assembly of economic actors was inaugurated with the Social Forum of Porto Alegre in 2000.  This time, like with the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World, it is civil society that chooses the date, the place, the methods and the topics of discussion in an imitation of official conferences.  The Social Forum itself was seen as a counterpoint to another world forum, the nearly thirty-year old Economic Forum of Davos.  The creation of this world economic forum that, over the years, has become a ritualistic meeting  of economic and political leaders that has attracted both respect and derision, is in itself an indicator of the general consciousness of the limits of dialogues between states.  More and more transnational actors are becoming conscious of their influence and the need to create mechanisms of direct dialogue between each other without going through states and national federations of employers that are becoming empty shells.

But neither official social and economic Committees, nor all of these expressions of forms of representation of society outside of parliamentary representation, clearly define the commitments and responsibilities of each milieu to society as a whole.  A nebulous of organisations gravitate around political bodies, taking on importance through media coverage but without clear explanations of the interests they defend, without the transparency of their finances, and without their being answerable for their acts.  This results in an ambiguous relationship between political leaders (in parliaments and governments) and these new forms of representations of society.  An ambiguity that is due to the fact that political leaders can’t deny the importance of these movements and their social significance but must, at the same time, reassert their monopoly on legitimate political representation.

Proposal 12	    Establishing collegial communities.

We must create communities of milieus at the global region and international levels.  We will call them “collegial communities” as they will come to constitute the various colleges of an assembly where various milieus will converse.

The notion of “collegial community” differs from that of the “representative institution” of a milieu, in that a community doesn’t just claim to defend the common  circumstances and interests of a milieu but also takes on responsibilities with regard to the rest of society.  In each milieu there are certain members that are more sensitive to the need for the milieu to evolve and to fulfil responsibilities concerning society while others have mainly corporative concerns.  The collegial community’s goal is to bring together this first category and allow its members to get to know one another and deliberate together on common perspectives.  The collegial communities don’t pretend to be representative of a milieu.  They will be based on the creation of networks of a same milieu and will share a common consciousness of their responsibilities and of future perspectives.  In an initial, founding phase, the network will elaborate and adopt a Charter of the responsibilities that the milieu will have in dealing with the shared challenges of humankind.  Modelled on the Human Responsibilities Charter, it will be adapted to the milieu.  With this founding act, this constitutional Charter, the members of the network recognise a unique commitment with regard to global society and also bring a balance to the defence of their own interests by seeking to contribute to the general welfare of society.  It is this recognition of responsibilities that establishes citizenship, that makes members of a milieu partners in global governance.  With this constitutional Charter, the members of a community give themselves the same obligations as political leaders themselves : transparency, maintaining consistency between declared values and acts, accountability, the elaboration of internal rules, that is, a form of accountability that provides for the expelling of members of a community that don’t respect their commitments.

The issue of an NGO’s representativity will be dealt with by having the collegial community submit the NGO to an approval process based on a set of guidelines that include:  an authentic transnational nature at the level of a world region ; an internal organisation allowing the verification of whether or not commitments have been fulfilled.  Thus, another form of accountability than that of politicians with regard to their constituencies takes shape :  company shareholders, members of a union or non-profit association all accept to have their acts monitored by the rest of society.

We have at our disposal a number of building blocks for such collegial communities : ethical investment codes for shareholders, consumers committed to supporting equitable trade, ethical codes and conduct guidelines  in companies and banks, good conduct charters in non-profit organisations that collect public donations, etc.  As our movement takes on greater and greater proportions, we should ensure that the Human Responsibilities Charter takes into account these different pre-existing charters by defining the mechanisms of accountability and responsibility and by providing the communities of milieus with explicit roles in world governance.

4-  National parliaments have a role to play in building the global community.

In theory, national parliaments of democratic states monitor international actions carried out by their governments.  They ratify international agreements and translate them into national law.  In practice, however, this prerogative of national parliaments doesn’t result in them participating in global governance.  International comparisons show that the measures that exist allowing commissions or competent parliamentary delegations to be kept informed or  obliging them to fulfil their responsibilities, are extremely variable.  Too often, international affairs aren’t debated or evaluated by parliaments.  Administrations, having acquired the habit of deliberating with colleagues at an international level, don’t necessarily appreciate parliamentary intrusions into what they deem is their territory.   And in any case, national parliaments, whose elections are based on local interests or partisan agendas, are likely to react to international affairs in either a nationalistic or meek manner.

The fact remains, nonetheless, that national parliaments will continue for a long while to be the primary expressions of universal suffrage, i.e. of democracy.  The European parliament, to date the only parliament at a global region level, has demonstrated that electing representatives within the scope of a national territory retains the faint odour of the representation of national interests. However, the existence of this sort of parliamentary body and its gradual consolidation are prerequisites to the creation of a democratic public forum at this new level.

International discussions between parliamentary representatives of different countries already exist.  These discussions usually focus on concrete challenges : the Parliamentarian Global Action is focused on peace, GLOBE on the environment, etc.  There also exist inter-parliamentary forms of dialogue.  An interplanetary system, for instance,  between countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and countries of the European Union, is set up to ensure the application of the “Lomé” agreements, a co-operation scheme between the EU and its former colonies.  On the other hand, there doesn’t yet exist an institutionalised form of dialogue between parliaments at the global region level, and even less at the planetary level.  We propose to provide a remedy, in part through the internet.

Proposal 13	    Establishing regional federations and a global federation of parliaments.

This proposal is based on an idea developed by the Earthaction movement.  At the level of each region of the world a regional parliamentary federation will be established.  To debate on the different common issues of a region, the federation will create commissions grouped within an electronic forum, allowing the discussion of different ideas and the  elaboration of proposals.  Each year, orientations and proposals will, during a virtual session, be submitted to a virtual parliamentary session in which all the members of parliament will join in a general debate and an indicative vote.

How should votes be weighted in this sort of indicative vote.  This is a classic governance problem that arises whenever a territory contains distinct entities that are  of varying size.  A representation proportionate to the population within each entity leads to the unwanted risk of smaller entities disappearing.  Inversely, equal representation of each of the entities assigns an unfair weight to small entities and this is unacceptable to big entities.  This is precisely why federal systems always have two chambers : one with representation weighted according to population, often through electoral districts of more or less equal size ; and another chamber with equal representation of entities, e.g. a Council of States, for instance.

It’s difficult, within the framework of a regional electronic parliament, to immediately deal with such complex matters, even if it’s possible to imagine both a regional electronic parliament and an Assembly of cities and provinces.  For now, one simple rule.  The World Citizens Assembly at Lille fixes the representation of the various entities according to the square root of their population.  The big entities continue to weigh more than the smaller ones, however, the small entities obtain a weight greater than they would have had we followed the basic rule of proportionality.

The creation of regional parliaments will allow us to create specialised commissions that will monitor the activities of different multilateral agencies.  They will quite naturally provide the means of following and monitoring the activities of representatives of the region within multilateral institutions.

The following step will be the creation of a global electronic parliament, designed according to the same principles as far as modes of operation and the respective weights of the regions relative to their populations.  Without it becoming necessary to  give formal prerogatives to the world parliament, the existence and quality of the discussions in its midst will contribute, first of all, to a better feeling for the responsibilities linked to international institutions, thereby increasing their legitimacy and efficiency, and secondly, to a heightened consciousness of the existence of a global community.

5-  The building of an international community should be punctuated by founding acts.

Over the last thirty years, numerous new actors have had to face the reality of global interdependencies.  Many have participated or been on the receiving end of economic globalisation.  International networks were created, including within social groups that have traditionally been dominated such as those of farmers and rural workers, or those of poor urban areas.  Global NGOs have emerged.  Thus, there exists a collective expertise of considerable importance, capable of a “top-to-bottom” vision, but also, and most importantly, of a “bottom-to-top” vision of the effects of the current international systems.  This collective ability and the vast awareness that it reflects are radically new acquisitions, often ahead of political  and administrative bodies that have remained  focused on national issues as a result of their vocations, electoral obligations or national agendas.

Proposal 14	   Organising a planetary constitutional assembly in 2008.

In order to arrive at a real founding act for the global community we must envision a founding Congress of several thousand people, genuinely representative of the world’s geo-cultural and collegial diversity, that will, without any formal prerogatives and just through the quality of its proposals and its critical mass, force governments to taken into consideration the proposals it produces.

The organisation of the World Citizens Assembly at Lille in December 2001 provides a model for this constitutional assembly.  Here, the representation of the world’s different regions is ensured in an equitable manner through the application of the rule of proportionality by the square root of the population.  The Assembly structure is based on the germs of collegial communities.  Finally, the preparatory work itself, carried out since 1994, allows us to submit a body of proposals to the Assembly.  Should the United Nations acknowledge the importance of the Constitutional Assembly project this would greatly influence our approach to the project between 2002 and 2008; it would give us reason to further detail our proposals and give a whole new dimension to the collegial communities.  An Assembly secretariat would be created whose mission would be to prepare an official report on global governance for 2006 that would be sent to all heads of state and governments.  This report would be submitted to all for debate.

6- The building of an international community requires stable funding and redistribution systems.

Proposal 15  Creating a global fiscal system.

The events of the last fifty years have demonstrated the weakness of funding mechanisms, like those belonging to international programs and agencies,  based exclusively on the membership fees of the member-states. 

This form of funding, unavoidable in the initial phase of the organising of an international operation, has many drawbacks in the long term : it allows all sorts of political blackmail; it is too undependable to establish permanent means of ensuring security; it favours, as the European Union demonstrates, international states making strict records of expenditures and income in international co-operation, resulting in an exacerbation of selfish attitudes.

We must, therefore, establish global fiscal partnerships resting on, for example :

•	The use of the planet’s rare or difficultly renewable resources.  This reality is synthesised by the “ecological fingerprint”
•	The usufruct of common goods 
•	Taxes on trade, material trade and financial trade;
•	A tax on capital linked to the idea that the creation of wealth is directly tied to the international ability to ensure civil peace and maintain the important balances between humankind and the biosphere.

Chapter III :  Defining common rules for the management of different categories of goods

1- Only some goods are linked to the market.

Exchanges between people and societies are the most direct expression of their ties and interdependence.  International trade contributes to the building of a global community and its organisation is a major part of global governance.  Not all exchanges are commercial, however.  The development of the marketplace and of international trade are means and not ends.  Means that serve human development objectives, in particular the constitutional objectives of the international community that we defined previously.  As a result, the growth of international trade and its mechanisms should be examined with regard to their real contribution to these objectives.

The confining of the notion of exchange to commercial exchange and the dominant role played by the growth of international trade in global governance are two major developments that have led to the undermining of global governance’s legitimacy.

This ground swell, limiting globalisation to the globalisation of markets, has benefited from the crisis of the state.  Going back in time, towards states managing  national economies and regulating all external exchanges, isn’t a solution to this development.  On the contrary, the solution should be prospective.   It should have the reality of interdependence for starting point so as to found a new order of exchanges.  This order is based on one observation : commercial exchange can’t be applied to the goods and services upon which the survival and welfare of humanity depends.  It is therefore necessary to start by making the necessary distinctions between different types of goods and services.  Then with this typology, useful to all levels of governance, we must determine the modes of regulation applicable to each category at the global level.

Proposal 16   Agreeing on a goods and services typology and defining those that concern the marketplace.

Traditionally, there was a clear distinction made between, on one hand, goods and public services whose production and use were partly outside of the marketplace, and on the other, commercial goods and services.  The boundaries between the two fluctuated considerably according to what the cultural and political  options of the states were.  The most striking example is that of health and education.  In the case of health services and education, the public/private criteria are based more on the finality of a product than on its particular characteristics (an appointment with the hairdresser differs little, technically speaking, from a medical appointment).  To say that a service is public is to assert the universal right to this service.

We can’t, with any degree of stability, base global governance on choices that are particular to each society at a given time.  Especially as education and health care can be provided through public funding and private actors.  It is possible, however, to establish a solid typology of goods and services by considering their nature rather than their finality. This typology allows us to distinguish four categories of goods :

•	The first category is made up of goods and services that are the fruit of our ingenuity and that are divided when shared, i.e. mainly industrial goods and services.  The marketplace is well adapted to this category.
•	The second category is made up of goods that are destroyed when shared.  They constitute the vast category of common goods and require collective management.
•	The third category is made up of goods that are divided when shared but that don’t necessarily involve mainly human activity.  They constitute the natural resources category and their allotment is better determined by social justice than by the marketplace.
•	The fourth category, the most interesting category with regard to the future, is made up of goods that multiply when shared : knowledge, intelligence, beauty, love, experience, etc.  They shouldn’t be submitted to the marketplace.  Instead, the reasoning behind mutualism seems most relevant :  I receive because I give.

By making the market an absolute value and an infallible means for rationally redistributing goods we envision just one single category :  merchandise.  In doing this we destroy the second category of goods, the common good and ecosystems, and we unfairly allocate the third category, natural resources, to a wealthy minority, and as for the fourth category, those who can’t afford to pay the price are artificially deprived of knowledge and experience.  Moreover, we end up with an economy that ignores the value of relations.

Governance is mainly interested in the last three categories of goods.  In this respect it serves two purposes :  defining the boundaries of the marketplace and, especially, limiting them to the first two categories of goods; and managing and promoting the two other categories.

Thus, the management of the ocean and coastal zones, goods of the second category, requires collective management.  This is true as well for the tropical forest or the vast, still virgin ecosystems of the steppes.  This management is necessarily a local form of management, in the hands of local territories.  These goods aren’t “reserves” cut off from all human intervention but areas where human activity is an integral part of ecosystems.  There can’t be, in this case, property or limited sovereignty.  However, the funding of this management necessarily requires the involvement of a vaster community – national, continental or global.
Water, soils and energy are typical of goods of the third category.  Their economic management, their reconditioning (in the case of water and soils) or their production (in the case of energy) require integrated and co-operative actions between various actors, from a local level to a national level.  These actions can involve private actors as long as they are consistently designed to protect, economise, reconstitute and distribute a common good.

Finally, the goods that multiply when shared are those that can provide indefinite human development compatible with finite resources.

This typology can have constitutional value.  It doesn’t propose an exhaustive list of the goods and services of each category and is open to much interpretation and debate.  This is precisely the objective.  It offers a framework for reflection and simple criteria for judging, within the infinite diversity of real situations, what can, at a given time, be legitimately considered a marketable good or not.  Thus, this typology should be incorporated into the founding charter of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The proposals that follow concern, respectively, the goods of the second, third and fourth categories.  They show how the application of the responsibility principle can lead to the defining of management rules unique to each category.

2-  The international community has to come to an agreement concerning the nature and management of global public goods.

Public goods are goods that belong to the second category, those that are destroyed when shared.  There can be no direct link between the production of a good and its use.  One example is biodiversity, the maintenance of which is effected by a number of actors, but that is beneficial to a vast number of other actors without it being possible to reward the first with usage duties levied on the second.  

Some of these public goods are essentially local, linked to a territory and beneficial primarily or exclusively to the inhabitants of this territory.  Others, that are of interest to us here, are beneficial to all of humankind.  These comprise the class of global public goods.  Among these: interdependent ecosystems that directly contribute to the biosphere’s equilibrium and the common heritage of humanity in all its diversity.

There are already international conventions devoted to some of these goods.  This is the case, for example, for the atmosphere, biodiversity and its vast reservoirs, particularly the tropical forests.  But up to now each of these conventions have been considered particular cases and the measures of protection are rarely accompanied by measures of funding.

As long as common principles aren’t adopted for these global public goods, the orientations elaborated by each convention and, most importantly, the application of these orientations, will remain dependent on the good will of states or current coalitions of interests.  As long as we don’t assert the principle of funding the production and protection of these goods by the international community as a whole, we make this protection a sort of servitude imposed on states without any compensation. As a result the states are quick to oppose these conventions by referring to the principle of sovereignty.  The debate on the protection of the Amazon is the best example of this.

The vast global ecosystems that contribute to the biosphere’s equilibrium are the first type of global public good.

The long-term viability of living systems depends on their ability to keep a certain amount of parameters stable whatever the fluctuations of the external world may be.  This is illustrated, for instance, in humans, where the internal temperature of human bodies can only fluctuate a few degrees, despite the fact that the external world’s temperature fluctuates several dozen degrees.  This rule also holds true for the biosphere, in which vast global ecosystems seem to play an essential, though poorly known, regulating role.

These include the ocean, the upper atmosphere, the vast steppes of Eurasia and the great tropical forests of South America.  Most are within territories and fall under the jurisdiction of a state.  The ocean itself is primarily within international jurisdiction but the quality of marine life depends mainly on the condition of coastal zones that are within state jurisdictions.  The global community must be able to legitimately play a part in the management of these world public goods.  To date, however, this legitimacy isn’t established.

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit's preparation gave us an idea of the weakness of this legitimacy.  Indeed, how could rich countries impose on others protective measures for ecosystems when they weren't ready themselves to question their lifestyles?

In the eyes of poor countries, the imposition of constraints that aren't related to their own priorities are ultimately designed to keep them from developing and becoming future competitors.  Poor countries also point out that if today they are the caretakers of these great natural ecosystems it's because rich countries, as they developed, eliminated the ecosystems on their own soil!  Local populations of coastal zones and tropical forests, confronted with some countries' plans to create natural reserves in which all human presence would be eliminated, immediately perceived a threat to their very existence. 

Proposal 17  Defining global public goods and funding their protection.

The conservation of global public goods, an essential part of global governance, requires respecting four conditions :

•	Demonstrating that the protection of these great ecosystems is one of humankind's basic needs.  In a field as complex as this one, where uncertainties are numerous, this requires a singular educative process, a change of perspective on relations between humankind and the biosphere, and the recognition of uncertainties, i.e. the application of the precaution principle.  If wealthy countries refuse to apply the precaution principle when their interests are at stake they can't expect to have it applied when it is convenient.  The conservation of great ecosystems should therefore be a global great cause.

•	Implicating local populations in the management of ecosystems.  Experience has shown that human activity is present and a part of a general equilibrium even in environments considered to be "natural".  The active and informed co-operation of the population should constitute a major part of this protection.  The mechanisms for funding this protection should make allies and not enemies of these populations.

•	Providing international funding based on the two criteria of population and wealth.  These public goods being beneficial to all, their protection should be funded by all.  In the distribution of funding between states the population criteria is obvious.  The wealth criteria, however, hinges on two considerations: :  what the state is able to contribute and the impact of the lifestyles of rich countries on the biosphere's equilibriums.

•	Recognising the debt linked to the past destruction of ecosystems. In the course of their development, societies have often deeply transformed ecosystems.  Sometimes it’s been a positive transformation, sometimes a negative one.  The destruction of many of the ecosystems that play a part in the biosphere's equilibrium can be considered an "ecological debt" owed by certain societies to all humankind and should be accounted for in the distribution of  funding for the protection of surviving ecosystems.

Our culturally and biologically diverse global heritage is another global public good.  Humankind's capacity for adapting to the future rests on its cultural diversity and on the biological diversity of the planet.  These two diversities are part of the global heritage, of the common goods of our Mother Earth.  This heritage also includes the lands and monuments that have been produced over the course of history. UNESCO provides the first attempted classification of these.  The protection of this heritage involves the same principles as those applied to global ecosystems.  They require, in particular, a financial implication on the international level to protect cultural diversity and maintain biodiversity, working side by side with local populations.  The need for this protection outweighs, in the hierarchy of rules and measures, considerations such as the promotion of international trade.

3- The international community has to agree on the nature, the management and the sharing of natural resources.

"Natural resources" are goods belonging to the third category, i.e., those that divide when shared and whose production is not based primarily on human activity.  Water, energy and fertile soils are among these goods and will serve here as examples.  All these goods have common traits in terms of both their nature and their current management.  They are located in a given territory and are therefore subject to property laws (particularly water and soils) and to state systems of sovereignty.   

There is only a limited quantity of these goods.  The total quantity of water is fixed, fossil fuels are the result of an accumulation over hundreds of millions of years and fertile soils are the product of transformations over a similar time span.

Human activities are nevertheless decisive in ensuring that their quality is maintained.  This is true  for the management of the water cycle, energy production, maintenance, and the generation and creation of fertile soils.  These human activities incur expenses and make use of technologies and the work of organisations.

Using and reproducing these resources are, as a result, at the junction between two worlds:  that of pure redistribution, based on the idea of  the "justness" of presenting a good as a gift; that of economic activity and the funding of maintenance and reproduction costs.   Between water, God's gift and, by nature, free,  and the transformation of water into a commercial article in the hands of private companies; between agrarian reforms whose goal is to redistribute land according to the criteria of strict social justice and the appropriation of land by the rich, we must identify the path that meets the two conditions of justice and efficiency.

Their increased consumption has been the very symbol of economic development.  For fifty years, the increase in water and energy consumption was a synonym of the development of material well-being.  Their waste - from water irrigation of golf courses to the fuelling of individual means of transport and air-conditioning - has become a sign of social standing.  Consumption in wealthy countries is more than ten times more than what is necessary.  The consumption of water, soil and energy combine to create lifestyles in which the equivalent of ten hectares is necessary for each human being when, on average, there is only one hectare available for each human being.

The increase in global consumption didn't result in a satisfaction of the basic needs of each human being, on the contrary.  For example, with regard to fuel, the 1.4 billion members of the OECD and the ex-USSR consume six times more energy than the 3 billion members of the poor half of humanity, some of whom barely have enough to make a meal.  A vast movement of concentration and private appropriation of water and soil can also be observed.

The contrast between the increase in demand and the stagnation of resources has given them great strategic importance.   From a short-term perspective, it isn't the scarcity of fossil fuel that is the threat.  It is the concentration of available resources in a small number of countries of the Middle East and Central Asia that puts gas and oil  at the heart of power struggles and the risks of armed conflict.   Similarly, it is the unequal distribution of water on the planet and the existence of vast zones where the scarcity of the resource exacerbates competitive rivalries that makes the control of water the most likely motive of future conflicts.  As for the unequal distribution of arable land, within or between countries, it is today a source of violent social tensions and will, tomorrow, be the cause of massive internal and international migrations.

Their current management remains dominated by supply-side policies.   Ensuring the ready availability of water and fossil fuels requires an impressive organisation  of their extraction, treatment and distribution, whereas the consumption of these resources within all human activities is accomplished by great numbers of users.  This has led to the emergence, in the energy industry and, more recently, the water industry, of big corporations that control supplies and make them the motor of consumption.   These corporations are more interested in selling their product than in stocking it.  

Natural resources are subjected to numerous competing uses.  On top of the tensions arising between social classes and countries as a result of the appropriation of resources, there exists heavy competition between  users.  Between irrigation water and city water; energy for transport and domestic energy use; land for farming and land for recreational purposes, urban development or infrastructures.  The distribution of scarce resources between users cannot be left only to the pressures of market forces.

Natural resources are within the scopes of both short-term and long-term cycles.  It is easy to dig a well and use water underground for immediate benefit but it takes much longer to restore the quantitative balance or the quality of the subterranean layers.  It’s easy to  drill an oil well, but it takes infinitely longer to reconstitute an energy reserve from the biomass, or from hydraulic or solar energy.  It’s easy, as well, to destructure soil or impoverish it, but it’s much harder to regenerate it.  Nevertheless, over the past centuries, these three resources have often been supplied through mining :we use a vein until it’s finished, then we move on to the next one.  This sort of exploitation clashes with the  traditional policies of societies that realised that their survival hinged on the maintenance of the water cycle, the fertility of soils and the balance between consumption and reproduction of energy.  The challenge today is that of rediscovering, through science and technology, but also through traditional human wisdom, an art of prudent and responsible management that protects equilibriums in the long-term.

Integrated management of natural resources depends on actors’ co-operation and on decentralisation.  Water conservation or complimentary uses of water, energy conservation and the upkeep of fertile soils depend on individual attitudes and reflexes as well as on regulated measures or the implementation of wide-scale policies.  An integrated and thrifty management of resources therefore requires both very decentralised and very centralised approaches.  These are therefore ideal fields of implementation of the active subsidiarity principle discussed later on.  Common guiding principles should be defined at a level of centralised decision-making, whereas the measures used to implement these  principles should be defined at the local level. 

The current taxation of natural resources is often counter-productive.  Water, energy and soils constitute major factors of agricultural and industrial production.   In both past and present this has resulted in a tendency to artificially reduce prices through indirect subsidies to producers.   As water is vital for daily living, selling it at the “real price” of reproduction creates the risk of provoking social unrest.  It is this fear that resulted in frequently unbalanced accounts at public water distribution companies.  It was an important factor leading to the privatisation of these companies.  It is therefore necessary to find the means of subsidising a minimal, vital use of water and heavily taxing the use that surpasses a certain limit.   The usual economic rationale of distributors clashes with this principle however: distributing small amounts of water is expensive and the price of water on the average bill received by consumers decreases as the quantity increases.  The fiscal system has the same counter productive nature : it is paradoxical to tax human labour then subsidise the use of natural resources.

The absolute nature of property and sovereignty is poorly adapted to natural resources.  Big water, oil and gas networks, extraction installations, stockage and treatment of energy and the upkeep of fertile soil all represent long-term investments that are incompatible with precarious usage fees.  But, on the other hand, when natural resources are permanently appropriated, as is generally the case at present, total income is drawn from the  use of scarce resources, regardless of how it is used.  This is neither compatible with social justice nor with the thrifty use of resources.  Latifundias  are the neighbours of landless peasants, water is wasted upstream when it is too scarce further downstream, oil revenues found the unproductive wealth of certain states while other states are deprived in basic needs.  Property and sovereignty are both linked to the same conception of the absolute right to use and abuse an owned good.  This principle must be reconsidered.

These observations on the nature and  current management of natural resources can help us design a set of rules for the future.  They should be clearly spelt out by the international community and require verifiable commitments on the part of states and production and distribution companies.

Proposal 18	Fixing common global rules for the management of natural resources.

•	We acknowledge every human being’s right to his/her share of natural resources. Consequently, a progressive price scale is fixed with a guaranteed low rate for minimal consumption.  This principle also means that those who, through their consumption, deprive others of resources, should be indebted to the human beings deprived of the same resources.  
•	The international community must prevent conflicts linked to unequal distribution and shortages of resources :  by diversifying the modes of energy production so as to diminish dependence on those countries that detain the bulk of reserves; by preventing water related conflicts through new international rules of distribution of this resource.
•	Public policy priorities are focused on reducing consumption.  We must radically dissociate economic growth and growth in the consumption of natural resources, as was the case with OPEC countries with regard to energy during the oil crises of 1974 and 1980.  The remuneration of companies specialised in the extraction, treatment and distribution of resources should be based on services rendered and not on the quantities consumed.
•	Competition between users cannot be determined strictly by market forces.  They are determined by a hierarchy and complementarity  of uses clearly spelled out by public powers.  
•	Policies should favour co-operation of actors and the elaboration of local solutions.
•	Property and sovereignty should be both conditional and operational.  They lose there absolute nature and are limited to long-lasting rights of use.  The preservation of this right is subject to rules of good use and upkeep of the resource.
•	Price fixing and taxation should favour the conservation and reproduction of the resource.

4- The international community should promote the goods that multiply when shared.

The fourth category of goods are those that multiply when shared.  It is by producing value for all that governance attracts general sympathy.  It should therefore make a priority of promoting this type of sharing.  Current global governance, however, by favouring the unlimited extension of mercantile exchange, gives the impression that it is shaped to deprive citizens of free goods:  the knowledge, experience and know-how that can be useful for survival.

The companies of the commercial economy, carried along by their energy and intoxicated by their successes,  have wanted, at the end of the twentieth century, to convince us that the fourth category of goods, those that multiply when shared, should be part of the commercial economy, and that this is the necessary condition for the development of knowledge (intellectual property), the funding of innovation (patents), or even their distribution (privatisation of cultural contents). As a result they have gone beyond their field of intervention and, in the coming decades, run the risk of being universally condemned.

The question of the patenting of the living world and of genetically modified organisms aren’t just  secondary issues, pitting the defenders of scientific progress against rebels with an irrational fear of the unknown.  On the contrary, it is a decisive choice that must be made by global society.  A prudent choice but also, and most of all, a philosophical choice.  “Several billion years were required for evolution to go from bacteria to the human embryo.  Only twenty years were required for the authorised patenting of the human being once the patenting of bacteria was acquired.  Once certain borders are crossed, every sort of conquest is imaginable.”  

There has been no global debate concerning this evolution.  It has been progressively promoted by a “patent community” that considers that the protection of intellectual property is the only way to encourage innovation and that the development of intellectual productions is the best way to maintain a comparative advantage over new competitors.   The outcry and opposition to this evolution has mainly come from civil society.  It is only thanks to the rejection of GMOs by European consumers and the South African battle against the patents that were preventing the country from fighting AIDS efficiently that a public debate has begun.

This debate has several facets :  is the accelerated development of  innovation really so urgent?  Is it legitimate to deprive life of its primary resource, i.e. its reproductive capacity?  Can the living world be patented?  How does one go about recognising that traditional knowledge and biological diversity are common goods that can’t be appropriated?  These issues must be resolved. 

Proposal 19	Organising the world-wide mutualisation of goods that multiply.

•	The living world is a common good.  Private research that concerns the living world can’t be funded through patenting.  Funding can be provided through an indemnity that  takes the form of a mandatory licence at a rate commensurate with the cost of research and use.  
•	The first priority of global governance is to mutualism knowledge and experience.

The sharing of experience is the most  efficient way to obtain added value.  It should be a priority objective and mechanism for world governance.  This is why a world-wide system of interconnected agencies and experience sharing will be established; implicating and federalising public agencies and networks of non-profit organisations.  It will provide a framework for citizens’ use of new information and communication technologies. 

Chapter IV  :  Controlling exchanges, controlling the pace of evolution

Governance is a mirror that provides society with a reflection of itself.  With it, society is endowed with the means to make the world more intelligible.  Thus, setting up organised systems for the production and structuring of information is not a secondary aspect of governance.  On the contrary, it is at its very heart.

Democracy also requires that individual intellects and  experiences meet and enrich one another resulting in the creation of a collective intelligence, the only one capable of dealing with the different facets of complex realities.

Governance is an art of action, regulation and piloting.  It capitalises on experience and develops the apprenticeships that are needed.  The building of an organised community is the fruit of such apprenticeships.  The creation of institutions, Charters and formal rules is essential but would be without real import if experience wasn’t there to enrich them over the years.

Finally, to be properly piloted a society needs measuring instruments and indicators capable of reflecting reality, highlighting what is essential and orienting the search for solutions.

These different dimensions of governance are applicable in particular to global governance.

1- The organisation of information systems is one of global governance’s major issues.

Televised news in real time and the exponential growth of information exchange on the internet can give the impression that everything is known, everything is seen and that global society, at least in the places that have access to television and internet, is informed.  But citizens have also acquired a suspicious attitude with regard to information.  The careful selection of images during the Gulf War, the fact that the media are concentrated in the hands of a few economic and financial groups and the faking of certain images has led to people understanding that the manipulation of information is an issue at least as critical as the transmission of information.  On top of this, the overabundance of information tends to kill information.  The policy of the media to focus on the event and on its immediacy doesn’t contribute much to our understanding of the contemporary world.   Pictures and sounds follow one another rapidly.  They create a kaleidoscope of impressions on emotions and memories rather than providing a structured outlook.  This flow of information is hardly adapted to the understanding of complex realities, to creating critical thinking or encouraging cross-cultural dialogue, although these three dimensions are vital to the building of a world community.  In this regard the tragic events of  September 11, 2001 are revealing.  On a world-wide level the initial, emotional reaction was that of anger and calls for justice to be done.  The rhetoric of the fight between good and evil, echoing the enemy’s rhetoric of God against Satan, seemed, at first, to dominate.  But, over time, the situation began to appear much more subtle and complex with a web of ties between the United States and Muslim fundamentalism, between drugs and the funding of war, between criminal funding and the mechanisms of international financial markets.  Each of these realities was well known by experts.  It is the ties between them that brought to light a reality in which torturers and victims are interchangeable, in which apparently enemy interests are interconnected.

Drugs and their trade being at the web’s centre, they provide us with a vital lead for understanding the manner in which information is manipulated on a world-wide level, within systems that are, in theory, democratic.  Most drugs had traditional uses and were subject to social regulations rather than prohibitions.  Under Western pressure a set of international laws based on the prohibition of drugs has gradually led to traditional regulations being replaced by delinquent use.  Under U.S. pressure the West has  sought the prohibition of drugs and not other toxic and dependence-inducing consumer products like tobacco and alcohol.   Drugs are mainly products of underdeveloped countries, while tobacco and alcohol are produced primarily by developed countries.  Thus, official information has tried to represent as an objective reality a discrimination between toxic products that penalises poor countries.  In order to achieve this it was necessary to mislead public opinion.  For many years the health risks of tobacco were underestimated and the dangers of drug use were grossly exaggerated.  Opinion polls show that drugs are at the top of the list of collective fears, instead of tobacco, alcohol and cars, even though these put the users at much greater risk.  These surveys also reveal that the fear of drugs is linked to a fear of foreign phenomenae, an association that is easily made since the prohibition of drugs generates an important income for a traffic that is symbolised by small peddlers who are of foreign extraction.   But the laundering of drug money is accomplished by international bankers who, until very recently, received very little attention.  Some activities and some actors are thus demonised, in particular producers and drug traffickers, while others are largely ignored.

It seems strange that the media, in their vast majority, can become so easily implicated in the manipulation of information.  But the media themselves are very dependent on primary information and this is usually obtained from institutional sources such as the police.  Thus, Columbia, for instance, is often in the media spotlight although Europe’s “drug problems” come from Turkey or Africa.

The fact that the manipulation of information is selective undermines global government legitimacy even more.  Tolerance is the rule when drug trafficking is practised by friends and allies; but intolerance and denunciation are the rule where adversaries are concerned.   Iran provides an illustration of this double standard : it was considered a criminal state by the U.S. until relations between the two countries began to warm.

Manipulation of information isn’t a media monopoly.  An examination of humanitarian operations, where NGOs are the producers of primary information for the media, creates a triangular relationship between states, NGOs and the media in which each has reasons for wanting information to be manipulated. 

The structuring of information by institutions isn’t necessarily due to conscious manipulation.  Each public institution is constantly producing information according to needs and constraints.  The mass of information they produce doesn’t necessarily provide a faithful and clear vision of the world.  Especially as United Nations agencies, essential sources of information at the global level, are dependent on the good will of member states for the information published that concerns them.  This dependence keeps institutions like the World Health Organisation from making many critical  judgements and is the  cause of the great discretion of international financial organisations.  

Some time ago, UNESCO hatched the idea of a new information order.  This new order was, at the time, often thought to be a possible counter information that would have more faithfully represented the realities of poor countries.  This idea never took on a concrete form but was progressively replaced by the development of independent observation and evaluation networks.

Despite this development it has remained difficult for actors to come across information, on water, energy, education, the environment or peace initiatives, that is applicable and sincere and based on the experiences of others.  The UN system, as a result of the diplomatic constraints already mentioned, but also because of its nature, is more focused on producing information concerning “good practices”, or, in other words, producing normative messages, than on contributing to the creation of systems for exchanging experiences.  In many fields there is a pressing demand for the creation of networks of know-how, bringing together independent specialists.

Proposal 20	Structuring independent information systems at a global level

The development of the internet and web sites, the designing of ever more intelligent search engines has made it possible to deal with each global issue collectively and to link each issue to the other by means of a common portal.  The Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World experience has shown how international networks can together build a data base of experiences.

The international community should support the progressive creation of networks designed for information retrieval and exchanging experiences.  The collegial communities will, as they develop on a common ethical base, constitute the framework for a decentralised but structured system allowing each citizen to find his/her way through the mass of available information.

Proposal 21  Encouraging the emergence of virtual learning communities.

An independent information system created by collegial communities will lead naturally to the development of apprenticeships.  Citizenship and democracy are themselves apprenticeships.   It is the discovery of what we can be taught by others, on the other side of the world and in seemingly radically different contexts, that gradually builds a consciousness and practice of global consciousness.  Internet and new information and communication technologies, just like all new techniques, produce both big opportunities and big risks.  One major responsibility in governance with regard to technology is to always develop opportunities and limit risks; internet is no exception to this rule.  Despite having appeared only recently, internet has already proved to be a decisive means for creating virtual learning communities that adopt common ethical rules so as to create, together, a forum for collective reflection as well as the means to mutually support one another in their struggle.  Unfortunately, to date, international institutions have been better at financing investments in material than at financing networks of actors.  We propose that the support of virtual communities who have decided to create a framework for co-operation be made an international priority.  The main goal of such frameworks would be the consolidation of capacities that would include autonomy, expertise, exchanges and initiatives on the part of popular groups; those that are most subject to the effects of initiatives that come from other actors within the society.  If we don’t want key decisions concerning humankind’s future to be the result of more or less balanced relationships between governments and the market’s most powerful actors, if we want to fight the tyranny, be it benevolent and enlightened, of the powerful, then providing virtual learning communities with this buttress should be a priority.

2-  Measuring systems should highlight material exchanges and human development.

National statistics systems and international institutions produce a great deal of statistical information.  Does it really allow us to have a good idea of the state of the planet, of its problems and of the extent of development?  An important question, especially in view of the fact that the instruments used for measuring structure representations and have a powerful impact on public policies as well as the individual decisions of consumers.  This observation is true for many different fields.  International security user warning indicators so as to adopt preventive rather than curative policies.   The state of ignorance with regard to soils is the result of an absence of indicators designed to reflect not only their chemical composition, but also, and most importantly, their structure.  Consumer information regarding agricultural products doesn’t give enough attention to the nutritional quality or these products.  The absence of tools for collecting local territories’ accounts prevents any reflections concerning the local economy from progressing.

Furthermore, in current systems, financial data and the monetary measuring of exchanges are favoured.  The wealth of nations is still measured almost exclusively with Gross National Product (GNP) statistics,  thus giving credit only to commercial exchange.  We are aware of the perverse effects of this tendency:  this type of measurement doesn’t take into consideration household work, social capital, the evolution of the quality of life or the evolution of stocks of natural resources.  We know exchanges only from the monetary point of view: what has no price has no value, is of no interest, is immeasurable.  This is true in companies but also at the territorial level.  A big modern city knows infinitely less about relations in its midst and with the outside world than a Chinese village did one thousand years ago.  It has a poor knowledge of its energy consumption, of the material exchanges  within and with the outside.  The great paradox is that the evolution of sciences, technologies and information systems has rendered us more unaware of concrete realities.  Since everything  has been assigned a monetary value and everything is exchanged in a market that has become global, monetary value becomes the measure of all things and the knowledge of concrete relations disappears.

Proposal 22	Creating a system for measuring exchange and the actual degree of development.

The UNPD’s perfected human development indicator is a first step that points future initiatives in the right direction.  Also, in the field of relations between humankind and the biosphere, the refining of systems designed to measure the material exchanges  at all levels, from the local to the global, is necessary.  We propose to organise a public debate that would associate UN agencies, universities and networks, in order to establish indicators and normalised measurements that would allow us to describe the evolution of the state of the planet.  Common rules for information retrieval,  monitoring mechanisms and a specific fund allowing public and private institutions to pursue information collection will make it possible to establish a common multilateral tool for monitoring and evaluation.

3-  Global governance should make it possible for humankind to control the pace of its evolution.

Preserving identity and being capable of evolving; welcoming modernity without letting oneself be absorbed or destroyed by it ; foreseeing coming changes and preparing for them ;  getting people’s energy and passion focused on a common project - the cement of community cohesiveness : governance, at all levels, is linked to time as well as space.  It should guarantee the stability and cohesiveness of the system in the short term and its evolution in the long term.  This “art of time management” is at the heart of global governance.

Proposal 23	Establishing regular sabbaticals for the international community.

In the last fifty years, the gap between the rapid evolution of realities and the slower evolution of representations and institutions is the cause of the current crisis of global governance.

A rapid evolution is not a goal in itself that should be imposed upon all of humankind. On the contrary, it is becoming urgent, if humankind isn’t controlling its evolution, to slow down or block certain transformations, at least long  enough for reflection and debate.  Slowing down that which advances too quickly, accelerating the transformation of that which goes too slowly are signs of clear-headedness and wisdom.

Humankind seems to be carried forward, in a mad race, by scientific and technological innovations and by the extension of the marketplace.  Those who have a stake in this race wish to have it represented as being essential for human progress.  This is an illusive attitude.  We have at our disposal enough knowledge to satisfy the needs of all, to invent models of sustainable development, to give everyone access to good hygienic conditions and health care, to offer everyone a quality education, etc.   Those who have stakes in the race have self-serving interests.  After World War II technological innovation became the motor of economic development upon which was based social cohesiveness.  But the terms of the problem have changed.  The gap between the rich and the poor and the inability of our regulation systems and our modes of development to preserve long term equilibriums between societies and with the biosphere have become humankind’s long-term dangers.

It is urgent that we take a break, that we decree a sabbatical year that could, if the Judaeo-Christian reference is acceptable to other cultures, be held every seven years.  A year devoted to debate and evaluation.  It would become one of the rituals that would help the international community establish itself.

Proposal 24   Making the precaution principle a shared model of responsibility.

To control doesn’t mean to understand.  Being in control involves being conscious of ignorance and uncertainty.

The responsibility principle can be applied to both the direct and indirect consequences of everyone’s acts.  These consequences are often uncertain and unpredictable. Responsibility implies taking into consideration the impossibility of really foreseeing consequences.

Each generation has its own challenges and prospects.  Guaranteeing the rights of future generations means ensuring that we don’t bequeath them an unliveable world and also making sure that, when the time comes, they can choose the path they want to take.  Present uncertainty and the possibility to make choices in the future are the precaution principle’s two dimensions.

Science has the reputation of producing infallible knowledge, thereby reducing risks.  But the history of the last fifty years shows that this isn’t true.  Though in certain fields science does improve our ability to make predictions, techno-science, on the other hand, produces radically new situations that interact with others in largely unpredictable conditions.  Sorcerer’s apprentices may well sneer at excessive wariness; they are rarely the ones who are most directly endangered if one of their innovations should have negative consequences.

The precaution principle, that, due to the extent of their personal responsibility, concerns above all the detainers of knowledge and power, transfers the burden of proof.  It is no longer a case of proving that an innovation will have disturbing consequences but, rather, of proving that it won’t.  Ten years ago the defenders of agriculture productivism laughed at those who, in the name of ethical standards, expressed indignation when herbivores were nourished with bone flours.   Then mad cow disease occurred, reminding us that human manipulations of the living world had largely unknown consequences.  Yet the same people today laugh at those who are wary of the effects of genetically modified organisms or of human cloning.  Until the day, perhaps, that a social or ecological catastrophe brings everyone back to reason.

Other people make soothing assertions so as to put off the critical date of a re-modelling of lifestyles; telling us that, when the time comes, we’ll be capable of finding the adapted technology, or that predictions of climate change are uncertain, or that we’ll end up finding new sources of energy.  Here again, the precaution principle transfers the burden of proof : those responsible should prove that if the worst case scenario should occur, solutions will be found despite the lack of preparedness.

Proposal 25	Elaborating very long-term strategies in vital fields.

There is a great deal of inertia within societies.  This is true for climate systems.  It’s also true for systems of representation and major institutions.  It’s also true for lifestyles, big networks of infrastructures and urban structures.

If we consider that the changes that the twenty-first century world will see will be of the same magnitude as when humankind passed from the middle ages to the modern world, we must keep in mind that they will occur in the space of a few decades.  It is urgent to act now, not because catastrophe is imminent, but rather because any necessary reaction time is limited.

Over the last few years humankind has become conscious of long-term challenges and opinion has begun having doubts as to the capacity of democracies to meet them.  If the notion that democracies are myopic begins to spread, we will soon have a context ripe for the appearance of new tyrannies. It has become urgent to consider different sectoral forecasts and underline their consistencies and inconsistencies.  The scientific community, the media and world leaders should act together so that these forecasts are used to explore unorthodox hypotheses.  When it was created, the Club of Rome was useful in bringing about a greater awareness of future challenges.   In retrospect, the simplifying nature of their forecasts doesn’t matter much.  It was enough to awaken concern and to make people understand that the world had undergone radical changes.  The international community should have permanently at its disposal  fifty-year forecasts that can serve to define a ten-year strategy.  This approach can furnish guidelines for the operations of multilateral organisms and can serve as a framework to which private actors can refer.

Chapter V :  Favoring and organising relations

1- The world is a system of relations.

Reforming governance presupposes a transformed vision of the world.

Currently, governance, like science and like production systems, is based on two principles: that of separation and that of instrumental reason.

According to the first principle we can only begin to understand and manage a complex reality if we break it up into clearly separate parts.  The relations between parts are used as interfaces between separate fields.

According to the second principle there is a rational way of dealing with each problem that is based on one objective and that ensures an optimal use of available resources. 

The first principle underestimates the relations between beings and things.  The second reduces everything to economic terms and underestimates the diversity of the objectives of humans and society.

This vision of the world is rooted in the educational systems that produce political and administrative elites.  Knowledge is broken down into disciplines. Each discipline has its own methods of analysis, its own operational methods and its own principles that are applied to the rational management of a section of reality.

The separation principle is deeply influenced by governance itself.  We can’t imagine a democracy that doesn’t have a strict allotment of competencies between the different levels, from the local level to the global level.   This division is meant to clarify each entity’s responsibilities.  At each level of governance, competencies are divided between different services or ministerial departments that each have an independent mission.  The parcelling of the planet into territories managed by sovereign states that are independent of one another is another effect of this thought system.  Without the division of competencies, there is no clarity, and without clarity there can be  no salvation.

These same principles govern agricultural and industrial production.  Vertical, single-function networks take form.  Industry is organised on a world-wide level with the creation of networks devoted to single products.  Even agriculture copies industrial production methods : it ignores the interrelationships within living organisms and ecosystems and prefers chemical treatment.  The soil itself is only considered to be a medium and receptacle for the contributions of industry.

Whatever doesn’t fit into this thought system is immediately suspected to be motivated by a desire to return to outdated systems of thought in which symbols, emotions and traditions have more weight than rationalism. Instrumental reason, donning the mask of science, can, with its intolerance of other approaches, be occasionally characterised as fundamentalist.

Education, governance, agriculture and industry can’t be completely unaware of their interdependencies with the rest of the world.  These interdependencies are now quite obvious and the need to take into account the interfaces that link domains is recognised by all.  The actual creation of these interfaces, however, isn’t yet deemed a priority.  The mediators, those who cross borders, are immediately accused of treason by each party.

In universities and laboratories there is constant preaching in favour of interdisciplinary approaches.  In reality, institutions remain firmly anchored in disciplinary approaches.  Woe betide him who genuinely practices interdisciplinary approaches or who devotes himself to conversations with society.

In the administration there is constant preaching in favour of cross-institutional approaches, for co-operation between services and between ministerial departments.  But he who co-operates too much with others is poorly looked upon by his own hierarchy.

In relations between states there is constant preaching for more international co-operation but only on the condition that it be considered an interface between national interests and not the beginning of a new approach to global community.

Industry and agriculture can no longer pretend to be unaware of their impact on the environment.  However, this impact is dealt with marginally, with pollution treatments rather than through a more integrated approach to the various forms of production within an ecosystem.

If humankind’s challenges are to be dealt with, a new vision of the world, a veritable reversal of perspectives, needs to occur. Relations between beings and things have become more important than the separation of elements.  This observation, which holds true for education, agriculture and for industry, also holds true for governance :  faced with the present systems, public and private, that favour “vertical approaches” to production and the distribution of goods and commercial services; that separate the public and the private, the social and the economic, material development and human development, humanity and the biosphere; that divide  the responsibilities of different levels of governance, the competencies of different public services, the activities of different types of actors; it is necessary to build modes of governance that are capable of managing relations between different branches of industry, between social actors and between human activity and ecosystems.

This requires a radically new perspective that would result, for instance, in considering that : a “local territory” is not to be defined as a portion of physical space, but rather as a system of open relations; that the first role of the state is to organise synergies between public and private actors; that global governance should no longer be the diplomatic space for relations between states, but instead should become a domestic space in which relations occur, if possible contractual relations, between different categories of actors.

The proposals that follow are concrete examples of this new perspective within four domains : the training of actors, the ties between global governance and other levels of governance, the organisation of co-operation between public and private actors, the designing of a social contract that binds each category of actor to the rest of society.

Proposal 26	Training actors for an integrated and partnership-based approach.

A reversal of perspectives requires a profound cultural evolution on the part of the actors themselves.  The organisation and operations of institutions interact with the ways of thinking, feeling and reasoning of their agents.  They are constantly influencing one another.  As long as those who have responsibilities within transnational organisations, e.g., international civil servants and company managers, are trained to be competent in very specialised fields and are ready to take actions only within the framework of hierarchical systems,  they won’t be the motors of needed reform and, if a reform is imposed upon them, they will either passively endure it or attempt to pervert it.

We must develop a common training space, probably in the form of network-linked universities, in which the administrators from both the public and private sectors will acquire, on an international level, a new culture in relations management.

2- Governance organises relations between levels of authority.

New forms of governance, capable of managing relations between industrial branches, between actors and between human activities and ecosystems, have two primary characteristics : they favour territorial approaches - the local territory being the concrete space in which various relations are organised ; they attribute much importance to relations between levels of governance and are therefore founded on the active subsidiarity principle.

Global governance cannot deprive national states, provinces or towns of their roles in managing society or impose on them uniform operational and behavioural models defined at the planetary level.  This would be both unacceptable and inefficient.  Nevertheless, better world-wide co-ordination is essential.  It’s this apparent contradiction that must be resolved.

Proposal 27	Organising relations between global governance and states in accordance with the active subsidiarity principle.

The active subsidiarity principle is rooted in the need to surmount the classic rivalry between the centralised approach, which, in the name of unity, considers that all political legitimacy comes from “above” – the Nation, one and indivisible, embodied by the state -, power being then delegated to more or less autonomous local powers; and the federal approach, which, in the name of autonomy, considers that all power should emanate from “below” – the community and local representatives – power being then devolved to the federal level for issues that individual communities can’t resolve alone.  In practice, these two opposing political philosophies have, to a great extent, joined hands today with centralised states decentralising and, inversely, federal states delegating more and more responsibilities to federal bodies.  Moreover, these two classic philosophies are based on the same conviction : that the clear allocation of roles between levels of governance is the only way to ensure a real evaluation of political action, i.e., the practice of democracy.  This conviction, however, is at odds with the realities of today’s world : no serious problem, be it related to water, education, energy, social cohesiveness or research and development,  can be conveniently dealt with at one level.  Any efficient policy must take into account relations between different levels of governance.  The mechanisms for co-operation between levels of governance become central in the architecture of governance.

The pre-eminence of the territorial approach doesn’t translate into autonomy for each territory.  Each of them is a parcel of our Mother Earth.  Each is “entrusted” with a society provided good management is practised.

The active subsidiarity principle contains three fundamental ideas :

•	Different levels of governance share a common responsibility : what is most important isn’t knowing how to manage the problems within the scope of one’s competence, but rather knowing how different levels of governance, each with their own means, co-operate in the management of common challenges, from the local to the global level.
•	Societies have common challenges (reflecting the unity of humankind) but, in every case, the best adapted solutions are specific  (reflecting diversity) : each territory must go about finding the specific responses best adapted to the common guiding principles defined at the global level.
•	No community has complete territorial sovereignty : each is both manager of their territory and accountable for this management to the entire international community.

The application of this principle in very different domains – industry, health care, security, economic development, the management of natural resources, monetary policies and  the organisation of exchanges, production systems, campaigns against poverty and marginalisation, the organisation of cities, transport systems, etc. – leads international institutions to promote partnership approaches, to elaborate common guidelines and to evaluate their application.

They must first of all promote integrated territorial approaches, in which actors and approaches are associated.  In the fields of water, energy and land management, the only efficient policies are those that bring together the diversified and decentralised actions of diverse actors, taking into account technological imperatives as well as social organisation. In the field of education only territorial anchoring can provide children with the tools for a systemic understanding of the world.  In the field of social marginalisation we must help the poorest increase their “social capital”, i.e., their relational networks.  In the field of financial exchanges we must invent new forms of economic solidarity and link local exchanges to wider-scale exchanges, if necessary through the use of different, complimentary currencies.  In the field of sustained development we must acquire a good understanding of material exchanges to ensure the complimentarity of activities.

Thus, rather than leading to an international economy that has broken all territorial ties, rather than making every individual an atomised and anonymous planetary producer and consumer, global governance should be the promoter of territorialised approaches and policies, opposing, if necessary, the current tendency of states to centralise and normalise.

Many multilateral agencies are conscious of the stakes involved and are ready to play a role but, in the absence of a general principle assigning them the right to play such a role, don’t think they have the sufficient legitimacy to do so.  However, the active subsidiarity principle provides them with a means of acquiring this legitimacy.  Multilateral institutions have a major role to play in the joint elaboration of guiding principles, of mandatory results  that can be applied to the various domains of governance.  They are or can be at the heart of the international exchanging of experiences.  This asset is, for the moment, poorly developed.  Firstly, because the natural interlocutors of these institutions are, for the moment, states that remain attached to hierarchical attitudes.  Secondly, because they are tempted to promote “models”, “good practices” and other sorts of universal recipes.  But, as the active subsidiarity principle demonstrates with force, there are universal issues that are the foundation of common guiding principles, but solutions are always specific.  By ceasing to be the favoured interlocutors of sectoral administrations, by no longer being sermonisers, international institutions will become more relevant and legitimate as no one will contest the great usefulness of the role they play as catalysts of shared experience.  

Finally, with the active subsidiarity principle the international community is brought to evaluate state policies.  The notion of sovereignty is no longer absolute.  Each state, accountable for its management to the entire international community, must accept acting under the scrutiny of others.  Actual intervention of the international community on a state’s territory should remain limited to exceptional cases : civil war, serious violations of international law or human rights, or environmental catastrophes for instance.  The international community’s monitoring of the way in which each state applies the guiding principles is henceforth the rule.

For a long time states wanted to be multilateral institutions’ only interlocutors.  Acknowledging the possibility of other interlocutors was comparable to blasphemy.  Over the years, under the pressure of reality, their attitude has grown more flexible.  In many fields – health care, science, transport and telecommunications, energy, water, and economic development – transnational companies have grown as powerful as states; global regulations can no longer disregard them.  Big NGOs are, for their part, provide continually expanding observation networks, expertise, evaluation and influence.  They represent one of society’s expressions.  Their legitimacy isn’t rooted in elections, but rather in their expertise, their influence on public opinion and the media and their ability to directly channel grassroots information and experience. Global governance must be open to these new international actors.

In theory, states still monopolise international relations.   Territorial authorities had to wait until the 1996 Istanbul Conference on Human Settlements  (Habitat) to be acknowledged as interlocutors of the UN.  Until then, they were considered to be a type of NGO, nothing more.  The active subsidiarity principle led to a complete change in attitude.

Proposal 28	Recognising the important role of international networks of territorial authorities.

The relations between local and global entities are no longer comparable to a Russian doll, pyramid-like and hierarchical; instead it is now organised into co-operating systems.  To assert that governance will favour territorial approaches leads us to assert that cities and territories will be major social actors during the twenty-first century, more important even than companies as they will be better adapted to manage complex systems of relations.

Influenced by the information revolution, by the economy of knowledge and by the growing desire for autonomy, the great pyramidal systems of the past, too rigid and too slow at adapting to opportunities and changes, disappear, leaving networked systems in their stead.  

In the future,  international networks of territorial authorities will be major actors in global governance.  This important role must be acknowledged and we must contribute to an acceleration of this new trend.

3- Governance organises co-operation between actors.

The active subsidiarity principle places the accent on the necessary co-operation between different levels of governance, from the local to the global levels.  But co-operation is also necessary between public institutions and between public and private actors.  In both cases, this co-operation hinges on conceptual, cultural and, sometimes, institutional changes.

Multilateral agencies are currently organised according to the traditional distribution of roles: to each his domain.   Separate operations are the role, joint operations are  exceptional.  This design should, in theory, avoid conflicts.  In reality, the issues that are dealt with inevitably overlap.  The World Bank deals with the AIDS problem.  Considering the extent of the AIDS problem in Africa, how could it not do so?  But this commitment results in the World Health Organisation (WHO) fearing that it will be dispossessed of an issue that it feels is, first and foremost, a health care issue.   The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has conflictual relations with the United Nations Environmental Program, the International Labour Office and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) when the principles of free trade clash with the protection of the environment, labour rights and food security.  

These sorts of conflicts are unavoidable.  But they don’t just have drawbacks.  They sometimes lead to public debate on choices and priorities for society.  They are counterproductive however, reflecting an organisational mode that underestimates the importance of the relations between issues.

The spelling out of common constitutional objectives, the adoption of a common hierarchy of norms and rules, the extension of the responsibility principle, the need for each agency to propose solutions adapted to each, specific situation, in accordance with the active subsidiarity principle: all of these evolutions converge to give birth to new operating methods for multinational institutions, methods that signify that co-operation is now a rule rather than an exception

Proposal 29	Systematising co-operation between multilateral agencies

We must favour regional decentralisation in multilateral agencies.  An agency’s seat retains the essential roles of catalysis, synthesis and the organisation of events.  In each region and each country we must encourage inter-institutional work.  In this new framework, multilateral agencies will no longer be the owners of the subjects that “pertain to competence”.  Instead, they bring a new perspective to a particular subject dealt with jointly.

States may consider that this sort of approach could endanger their sovereignty; they consider themselves to be the only legitimate entities that can synthesise  different sectoral approaches.  But most of them have difficulty making their own sector-based administrations work together.  A more co-operative approach on the part of multilateral institutions would be of great use if, in accordance with the active subsidiarity principle, multilateral agencies would begin to be sources of inexhaustible information and experience rather than prescribers  of universal solutions.  

These sorts of inter-agency co-operative strategies are particularly useful with regard to countries that have suffered civil wars or that are in the midst of a difficult transition.  These countries have to face cultural, economic and institutional challenges that are interconnected, and we must help them re-build and develop integrated strategies.  Inter-agency co-operation can help achieve these objectives and can thus provide an inestimable contribution to the art of peace.

According to traditional principles of governance, public actors are in charge of public interest and private actors pursue private interests.  The only form of intervention that public authorities tolerate on the part of private actors (companies or civil society organisations) are those that, in theory, make these actors the tools of public service, the implementers of public policy.  This representation is also the consequence of a traditional conception that places public authorities “ above ” society.

This simplistic representation of the public good has several consequences.  First of all, it masks the fact that public services are in the hands of business leaders or corporations that are self-serving.  Secondly, it leads to the rationale of “ all or nothing ”.  When a public service such as transport, telecommunications, water distribution or electricity proves to be badly managed and heavily in debt, we tend to shift to the other extreme with privatisation, thus creating a new type of monopoly, in the hands of private interests and that doesn’t fulfil all the duties of a real public service.

Proposal 30  Creating the conditions for a partnership between public and private actors.

In certain countries there already exists a long tradition of mixed economies and of public-private partnerships for providing public services.  At the global level, this tradition can be revitalised and enriched by incorporating new concepts : the responsibility principle, active subsidiarity, the prioritising of the management of relations.

According to the responsibility principle it isn’t the nature, private or public, of an actor that ultimately determines his responsibility.  A private actor who, by his size and his actions, has an impact on the common good must accept his public responsibility.  As a result he is held accountable, must submit himself to monitoring and is subject to legal proceedings.

According to the active subsidiarity principle, public institutions define guiding principles but don’t decree the detailed directives for putting these principles into practice. The choice of actors, public or private, for putting the guiding principles into practice should be adapted to the specific situations.

The priority given to relations leads public authorities to favour partnerships and to function as catalysts of collective action.  It is now time to define the guiding principles of this partnership.  There are two main aspects : public authorities’ ability to come into a dialogue and a partnership ;  private actors’ agreeing to accept a code of conduct and an acknowledgement of their responsibilities.

To arrive at a real partnership between public and private actors a deep change is necessary.

This change is, first of all, cultural.  The idea of a dialogue on equal terms, without the administration imposing its language, mental categories, constraints, procedures and pace, isn’t very popular, particularly with regard to dialogues with the poorest categories of society, those furthest away from power and its codes.

This change is, secondly, administrative.  The stricter the procedures, the less civil servants are free to adapt them and the more the administration forces its methods of dialogue on its interlocutors.  This is contrary to a real dialogue in which reciprocal listening and influencing occurs.  So that a real partnership centred on a common objective can see the light, each partner needs to be free to negotiate and take initiatives; otherwise public authorities stifle those they seek to embrace.  Many partnerships that are sincerely sought out by public authorities are, in practice, just invitations made to others to participate in a project that is unilaterally defined by the administration.

At the global level, power relations are sometimes completely reversed.  Private actors dispose of such considerable human and financial means, are so clearly superior in their expertise, that they end up imposing their thought system.  This is the case in the fields of water and energy for example.

4-  Global governance organises contractual bonds within society.

The extension of the notion of contract is another way to get out of an overly “statist” representation of governance, where rules, surveillance and sanctions are favoured.   The naive idea that each individuals’ moral and civic sense of duty will inspire everyone to act in the public interest isn’t the only way of avoiding statism.  Another way consists in reinforcing the binding force of contracts.

When a scientific or academic community, for example, asks all of society for the freedom and the means of accomplishing its research and education it is in fact entering a contractual relationship with society.  The privileges that  it enjoys are the counterpart of its presumed social utility.  This social contract needs to be updated.  Its respect should be evaluated.   This doesn't necessarily imply that the state should intervene.

The scientific community’s activity, for example, has, for the last fifty years, been effected within the framework of a social contract elaborated soon after World War II.  Society upholds unimpeded scientific research as it provides a regular flow of technological innovations that create new activities, which leads to jobs being created, which ensures social cohesiveness, which in turn ensures peace.  This social contract, implicit but very real, is the basis for society’s image of science today.  Does this contract remain valid at the beginning of the twenty-first century?  Doubts may exist.  A debate on whether to update the terms of the contract is thus necessary within the scientific community and with the rest of the world.

This approach is valid for many other categories, whether or not they receive public funding.  Farmers count on the support of society and, in exchange, guarantee that society won’t starve.  Can the contract be defined in these terms today, in developing countries, for example?  Of course not!  A new social contract is needed today, one that is based on health, the quality of foodstuffs and land management.  

Bankers’ role was to orient savings towards activities that were useful and that generated wealth.  Do financial markets fit into this traditional definition?  What is the basis for the contract today?  And there are many more examples that serve to illustrate this point.

When investment banks assigns a country or a company a score for measuring the risk associated with a loan they have a decisive impact on the conditions in which the loan is taken out and this evaluation, though private, has more powerful effects more important than many public rules.

When a group of producers create a quality label, they establish a contract by which they make a commitment to consumers regarding their products’ characteristics.  Private means are then applied to monitoring whether or not the contract is properly respected.  For example, many manufacturers promise to respect a standard quality norm, the ISO norm, that guarantees the quality of the product or respect for the environment.  It is a private norm that has contractual value, with an assortment of private means for monitoring the respect of the contracts’ terms.

International business contracts generally have their own built in mechanisms for settling disputes.   Taking a dispute to an international court is long and hazardous and is only considered viable when all else fails.  The loss of credibility of an actor within a professional community is the most immediate and often more dissuasive than a court sentence.  The World Trade Organisation applied the same principles when it came up with its own mechanisms for resolving disputes.

The recent development of ethical investments, the new demands of wage earners with regard to the manner in which their pension funds are invested and equitable trade labels are other examples of the emergence of new contractual principles based on the concern for citizenship of one or several partners.

Establishing international law is always a slow process.  An international convention must first be negotiated between states then ratified by parliaments.  Moreover, once this obstacle course is finished, the will and the means of implementation, in the event of non-respect of the contract’s terms, are often insufficient or subordinated to the power rapport of the actors and to political affinities.  Drug trafficking is a typical illustration of how certain practices are stigmatised, or, on the contrary, hushed up, according to whether friends or enemies are concerned.  In these conditions, and in a context where transnational actors are developing, the contractual approach is becoming a favourite.

Proposal 31  Building a contractual framework for partnerships between actors.

The idea of a social contract is linked to the idea of establishing collegial communities.  A collegial community brings together those who, in a given professional environment, acknowledge and assert their responsibilities.  They consider themselves to be members of a community that is tied to the rest of a society by a social contract.  This contract goes beyond the individual responsibilities of each actor: it commits the members of a same collegial community to the terms and the respect of this contract.

This social contract philosophy leads to a concrete contractual practice.  The contracts will usually comprise several parties.  They could, for example, associate scientists, NGOs and companies; farmers, distributors and consumers; or shareholders, banks and companies. 

A reflection on the social contracts that tie each type of actor to the rest of society will lead to the creation of  contract frameworks.  They will become the reference for particular contracts, in the same way that collective agreements between employers and employees have.

The generalisation of this practice will lead to the creation of systems of evaluation that are private, but of public interest.

This prospect constitutes the application of the active subsidiarity principle to the organisation of social life.  It has the advantage of easily adapting to companies that are undergoing changes and easily associating transnational actors as well as local actors.

Chapter VI :  Re-modelling methods

Governance at the city and state levels is the fruit of many centuries of experience.  Practices were codified over the last two centuries into a body of principles that defined the rules of representative democracy:  the separation of the legislative, executive and judiciary powers, free elections and universal suffrage, majority rule, the creation of checks and balances and civil service status.  This body of rules doesn’t shield representative democracy from criticism and crises, even at the local and national levels, as the evolution of society transforms the working conditions of the political system.  Also, these rules, created in Western Europe, aren’t always adapted to other civilisations, nor are they genuinely appropriated by them. In many parts of the world people are attempting to rethink democracy and reform the state.

More urgent, though, is the need for innovation in the field of global governance as this concerns creating rules for workable democracy at the planetary level, before catastrophes lead to the establishing of a totalitarian world order and prevent, at least in the short term, the creation of a global parliamentary democracy endowed with real powers.  This peaceful construction requires that states and the different peoples of the Earth look beyond their particular interests and, for the common good of all, alienate part of their sovereignty.  The construction of the European Union since World War II is the only comparable, though much less complex, initiative.  But here, the concerned societies shared a common history and culture.  The founders of the EU, in particular Jean Monnet, were conscious that building Europe was just a first step towards the creation of a future United States of the World.

The proposals that were presented in the preceding chapters all worked towards the emergence of a world community endowed with means for carrying out legitimate governance and with the capacity to shape its destiny.  This last chapter will be devoted to institutions.  Rather than dealing with the distribution of powers, it concerns the institutions’ concrete workings by addressing two common questions at all levels of governance:

•	How should we go about organising the cycles of elaboration, deliberation, application and monitoring of public policy?
•	How do we devise and put into place mechanisms adapted to the goals that are set?

We will deal successively with the organisation of  the global political scene, the distinction between the power to propose policy and the power to make policy decisions, the means of independent expertise, the reform of decision-making authorities, checks and balances, the evaluation, monitoring and application of decisions, and the auditing of multilateral institutions’ operations.

1- The organisation of the global agora. 

Democracy, before being a mechanism for electing public officials, is a way of associating all the members of the community for the task of understanding and resolving common problems.

In many societies collective deliberation mechanisms exist, at least at the most local level of villages and neighbourhoods, in forms that are more alive and genuine than in Western democracy.   From the African tree of parables to the Indian Penchayat, these frameworks for public debating are an essential ingredient of society life.  They create a public meeting place and allow each individual, before the actual decision-making process occurs, to contribute to defining the common issues at stake and the terms of the debate.  Democracy continues to be based on  representations of forums and agoras, where people assemble to discuss together the city’s affairs.

Public debate, before being a means of expressing opinions, contradicting, convincing and looking for consensual solutions,  has instituting value.  It allows a community to acknowledge its own existence and  give this existence meaning.

In large scale communities, i.e., almost all modern societies, the decision-making mechanisms, institutions, the relations between powers, are necessarily complex and thus more or less opaque for ordinary citizens.  This opacity gives them the feeling that they no longer control their own destinies, especially as the future depends less on political decisions proper than scientific and technological evolutions or international economic decisions on which ordinary citizens have no real influence.

In our societies the issues at stake are themselves very complex, often involving technical considerations and requiring scientific knowledge and the advice of experts.  This is an additional cause for the bewilderment of ordinary citizens.

Thus, organising an agora can be of enormous value: progressively building the terms of the debate and making complex issues understandable.  This way of progressively bringing to light the terms of the debate through deliberation isn’t unique to governance.  Mechanisms of the same nature can be observed within pluridisciplinary scientific teams that work together: only deliberation allows them to gradually create a common language and system of representations, the prerequisite to the sharing of one another’s specific contributions.

In Denmark a few years ago, a new democratic procedure, that of consensus conferences, was invented and it has since been taken up by other countries.  These conferences bring together a group of citizens that is as representative as possible of society’s diversity.  They work on clearing up a complex issue and benefit from the often contradictory points of view of different experts in the concerned field.  This deliberation technique, that gets its inspiration from the democratic court system, in which juries are presented with the contradictory arguments of the prosecution and the defence, shows that ordinary citizens can be remarkably good at clearing up the terms of the debate.

The media can also provide a valuable contribution to this process.  However, it must be conceded that the importance given to the narration of events and to the segmentation of information, the growing dependence of media on big economic and financial groups, isn’t always good for the clarity and objectivity of a debate.

Influencing public opinion and leaders is in the interest of all organised groups, whether they be opinion-based or based on economic interests.  These groups develop, sometimes thanks to big financial means, strategies designed to achieve this influence, to fix the attention and sympathy of the media, to influence public opinion directly or to influence  underground centres of decision-making.  This lobbying, in which big NGOs have become experts over the last few years, also contributes, as long as it remains public, to clearing up the terms of a debate.

The development of internet and its use are also deeply transforming the conditions  in which public debate is carried out, especially at the global level.  The low cost eliminates the distance problem and distribution lists facilitate widespread mailings.  Experience has demonstrated that an electronic forum that is long lasting and that follows strict criteria, allows for the emergence of a virtual public agora. 

Proposal 32	creating  global public areas where citizens can debate

The creation of a global agora can be considered to be a new public good to be developed and protected.

The international conferences organised by the UN during the 1990s gave NGOs a progressively bigger role and brought about preliminary debates prefiguring a global agora.  This system has its limits.  From each conference has sprung a specialised debate that is revived five years later with a follow-up conference: “Rio + 5”, “Habitat + 5”, etc.   Civil society sessions unfold as counterpoints to official sessions rather than interacting with them.  Here, NGOs from developed countries, financed by developed countries, dominate and impose their agenda.  Despite these limits these conferences have provided the opportunity for collective apprenticeships on which to lean before going further.

The UN should create permanent debate areas and delegate their management to organisations emanating from civil society.  A balance between the various regions of the world will be respected.  These debate areas on the internet will federate regional debate spaces,  organised in accordance with the same principle, and will themselves group together local forums that use the country’s language.  The operation of this network will allow the international community to perfect other means of linking the local to the global.   The forum system developed by the alliance can provide an initial prototype.
2- The proposal elaboration and decision-making processes.

Traditionally in governance the emphasis is placed on the moment that decisions are made. It is at this critical juncture that power manifests itself and that political leaders put themselves on the line.  This is why, during each election,  the debates between political parties often concern their rival programs, i.e., different solutions to the same problems.  Representative democracy and the growing importance of televised debates create an impression, sometimes illusory, that there is a real confrontation between different programs, especially when their differences are very subtle on essential issues.

In reality, the more complex the situation is the less easy it is to elaborate alternative solutions.  Moreover, when governance’s objective is to bring about co-operation between  society’s different actors,  it is through a co-operative process that solutions are found that are acceptable to everyone.  When a society is complex the real political stakes are more likely to be located at the level where adequate solutions are developed than at the level where a choice is made between rival solutions.  The power to make proposals and the organisation of the process of elaboration of proposals is of more significance than the power to make decisions.

In most political systems the power to make proposals and the power to make decisions are dissociated.  Even in the field of the elaboration of laws, in theory the domain of the legislative branch, it is in practice the administration, subordinated to the executive branch, that prepares the legislative projects that are debated and that, therefore, officially or unofficially disposes of most of the power to make proposals.  The existence of two clearly distinguished moments, the elaboration of proposals, on one hand, and the decision-making process, on the other, appears to be an essential characteristic of democracy.

The construction of the European Union, attributable to the impetus provided by its founding fathers, provided the opportunity to rethink this distinction.   From the very beginning of the EU’s creation, it was necessary to deal with a major challenge: on the one hand,  common solutions that went beyond the scope of national interests had to be elaborated; but on the other hand, national states were being rapidly rebuilt and re-organised after the war and national sentiment remained strong, making the prospect of solid public support for a supranational power that would have imposed its will on sovereign states rather bleak indeed.

The founding fathers struck on the idea of creating a European Commission that would have an extra national rather than a supranational status.  This Commission has become the legitimate organ of the elaboration of proposals deemed of common interest.  It works under the authority of the president of the Commission.  The Counsel, in turn, made up of state representatives, retains the decision-making power.

Within the context of the European Union, this is now limited: the elaboration mechanism is too confidential and, as a result, is too open, or is considered too open, to the influence of lobbies; the Commission didn’t manage to produce the forums for public debate that would guarantee, within the process of elaboration of proposals, the democratisation of the terms of the debate;  at the decision-making level, the unanimity rule that is currently in force, isn’t adapted to the incoming of ever growing numbers of countries into the Union.  It is nevertheless this set of mechanisms that has allowed, in the space of fifty years, for the emergence of a real human community.

Proposal 33  Giving the Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations a proposal-making monopoly for international decisions.

We propose to establish within the United Nations the system that exists within the European Union.  This will provide a starting point for the regeneration of the system.

This requires three steps:  the constitution of a veritable World Commission by the different agencies and their directors.  A college of Directors-General presided by the Secretary General of the United Nations, will constitute the executive branch of the Commission.  We will be careful to maintain a balance within this college between the different regions of the world.  We can even consider, on a consultative basis at first, submitting the candidacy of the Secretary General of the United Nations, as well as the candidacies of the Directors, to the World Electronic Parliament.  The candidates will present themselves as well as parts of their programs.  The organisation of two debates, one on an electronic forum and the other before the World Parliament, will allow for the appropriation of global problems by international public opinions.

Decision-making power will remain within the Assembly of States.  It will have two levels of operation:  the regional community level and then the world-wide community level.  Decisions will be taken in accordance with the qualified majority rule at the global region level, and the rule of unanimity of the global regions at the global level.

This framework will lead to the democratisation of the Security Council.  It will no longer be composed of the victorious countries of World War II, to whom are added other countries in rotation.  Instead it will be a permanent organ, made up of the representatives of the different regions of the world.

An Economic Security Council will become, just as the European Council of Ministers of Finance did, the regular location for discussion and decision-making in economic and financial fields.  It will be responsible in particular for the establishing of a new architecture for the international financial system and for the redefining of the mandates of the international institutions, the IMF and the World Bank.

The policies elaborated for the great global causes will be subject to the approval of the College of agency directors before being submitted to the Council of States.

3- monitoring of the application of international decisions.

Every democratic system requires rules of fair play, the existence of counterbalancing powers and means of recourse for opposing the decisions of public authorities.  This rule holds true for global governance.  All of the proposals contribute to balancing the power of states with the organisation of parliaments, civil society and collegial communities.  Moreover, the creation of independent systems of information at the global level and the bolstering of emerging virtual learning communities provides, through their monitoring capacity, a counterbalance to the expertise in the hands of states and big companies.  The constitutional defining of objectives and the responsibility principle create a base of reference for making judgements concerning public and private authorities.

All of these counterbalances aren’t enough to provoke an explicit and legitimate evaluation of the action of authorities.  Mechanisms of recourse are necessary.  Over the centuries and across cultures, societies have invented different means of recourse: sometimes in the form of a supreme court, ruling on the constitutionality of the laws and acts of public officials; sometimes in a less directly judicial form with mediators entitled to question administrations on abuses of power, or with courts designed to make public recommendations concerning public officials. 

To compensate for the absence of recourse that characterises current global governance, civil society has come up with its own mechanisms for public evaluation, such as, for instance, the Court of Peoples based in Rome.  This sort of mechanism, like the reports of Amnesty International, Transparency International and the Prison Observatory, is auto-constituted and doesn’t dispose of other means than its credibility and the earnestness of its interventions.  In societies where information is globalised, this questioning of public opinion, of consumers, investors and, simply, citizens, can have much more weight than the pronouncements of public authorities.  Similarly, the development of partnerships between actors has increased the importance of mechanisms for settling disputes.

All of these mechanisms are sources of inspiration for monitoring and recourse mechanisms that have to be established for the possibly long period during which global governance is reinforced without their being, at a global level, a democratic government in the classic form seen at the national state level.

Proposal 34	 Endowing a council of Elders with the responsibility of questioning public officials.

In all societies there exists, in one form or another, the notion of the wise and valuable counsellor: individuals old enough to have provided the proof of their wisdom and their devotion to the common good, to have had significant experience in the field of managing community affairs, and to no longer be tempted by power.  It is frequent in village communities to see the villagers submit to the arbitration of such counsellors, though the judgements carry no legal weight.  The party that accepts the arbitration but doesn’t accept its judgement ends up cut off from his community.

At the world level we propose to thus constitute a Council of sixty Elders, a third of which would be nominated by the parliaments of the various regional communities. Another third would be nominated by collegial communities, and another third by institutions like supreme courts and constitutional courts in the different regions of the world.  Common criteria could be elaborated for the profiles of these Elders.  One of these criteria would be experience in world affairs, whether in the framework of public institutions, or that of non-governmental organisations, or that of companies or scientific institutions.  For each Elder there will be one substitute who the Elder will choose him/herself. The pool of substitutes could harbour a choice of future Elders.  An age limit, sixty-six years for example, and a maximum time span for a mandate, e.g., ten years, would allow for a continuity of the council’s operations, without creating life-long mandates.  The Council of Elders will dispose of few services but will have vast prerogatives in different fields of investigation.  The primary fields could be:

•	Equity in treatment and sanctions in international agreements.
•	Respect of constitutional objectives by every agency.
•	The effective application of international conventions.
•	The recourse of citizens against international decisions.
•	The operations of independent networks of information and expertise.
•	The respect of codes of conduct by different international actors, multilateral agencies, companies and non-governmental organisations.

The Council of Elders will be divided into specialised sections.  One of these will be devoted to mediations between citizens and international institutions.

The report on the state of the world presented by the Secretary General of the UN will necessarily refer to the annual report of the Elders.  It will have to mention the concrete measures taken in response to the criticisms that the Elders’ report contains. The Elders’ report won’t necessarily be consensual.  In the event of disagreement within the Council, the dissenting arguments will be included in the report.  The annual report of the Elders will be public, its observations will be backed up by concrete examples, and, if possible,  will be illustrated with films.  The Elders’ annual report will be published on the internet.

Proposal 35  Holding planetary parliaments annually. 

Each year the Parliament will meet for an eight-day session.  It will be made up of four hundred people, one half of which will be chosen by the federations of regional parliaments, the other half by the collegial communities.  The parliamentary deliberations will be public.  The report of the Council of Elders will have to be discussed by the Parliament.  The Parliament will accept or reject the report on the state of the world presented by the UN Secretary General.  It will be able to summon the directors of multilateral agencies.  The agenda, set three months in advance by the office of the Parliament, will provide for a thorough audit of the implementation of a great global cause policy, of the actions of a particular multilateral agency, or the application of an international convention.

The Parliament’s votes will be consultative, but in the event of a disavowal on the part of the World Commission or its Secretary General, the Council of States will be required to pass a qualified majority vote on whether to renew their confidence in the Commission or dismiss it.
4- The continual evaluation of the global governance system.

The art of governance is an art of execution, an art of action, an art of thinking up mechanisms commensurate with the pursuit of objectives.  Global governance leads to the creation of a body of institutions.  Each of them has a deeply ingrained logic that governs its reactions, that determines the limits of its perception of reality, that orients or even determines the nature of the solutions that it is capable of conceiving and implementing.  This logic becomes dominant, sometimes without the actors realising it, and even when it is in contradiction with the assigned objectives.

Governance, at the local or national levels, deals with problems that have either been dealt with before or have precedents.  It therefore gets its inspiration from models that it is hoped have been certified by experience.  But despite this, many public institutional systems are currently in a quandary due to the inefficiency of their response to the new objectives they are assigned.  All the more reason for global governance, that demands the invention of new responses to problems on a new level and new scale, to proceed by trial and error with the regular evaluation of whether or not the chosen measures are adequate with regard to the desired objectives.

Proposal 36	Establishing a permanent audit of multilateral institutions.   

This internal audit will be directly linked to the Secretary General.  It will, in accordance with a plan developed every few years, take the form of an inspection of the concrete modes of operation of the various multilateral institutions, including the World Commission and the Council of Elders.

The audit will always be organised so that the internal analysis of the operations of institutions and the observations of the users of these institutions are contrasted.  Its goal will be to verify that the concepts that are used, the structures that are elaborated, the administrational cultures that are developed, the procedures that are used, the management of human resources and the systems of evaluation of multilateral institutions are adapted to the pursued objectives.  Particular attention will be given to the mechanisms of partnership with other actors.