Multinational Governance in an Unequal World: The Kyoto Process and the Actors Involved

The term ‘governance’ is often used to identify and theorise about evolving mixes of formally legal agreements between states and non-formal types of indirect governing, often via ‘steering’ and networking. Although governance approaches are increasingly deployed in transnational contexts, they began at the national level. During the crisis of Fordism at the latest, it became evident that a state’s capacity to act was limited in domains such as economic, employment and social policies as well as in environmental protection. The influence of non-state actors in socio-economic regulation became greater in the situation of globalisation, and the idea of cooperation between public and non-public actors, for example in the form of ‘public-private partnerships’, gained both in importance and popularity. At the national level, this was accompanied by the concept of the ‘cooperative state’, which ‘steers’ the various actors who participate in governance networks via negotiations, cooperative conflict resolution and agreement. According to Renate Mayntz (2009, p. 164), the point of departure for governance theorists is not the description of a problem or a policy target but the analysis of existing institutions and the issue of their functions and of how well they fulfil them. Problems are seen as ‘challenges’ in relation to a theoretically constructed optimum situation, which at the same time serves as benchmark for institutional change.