ja_mageia

Much was made of the way in which, with the onset of the global crisis, the hastily-promoted G20 conferences of November 2008 in Washington DC, and 2009 in London, were intended to achieve a putative ‘Bretton Woods II’. Not wishing to be under-hyped, the conferences were even hailed in some quarters as representing the opening of global democracy to the hitherto unrepresented (perhaps oblivious to the 150 countries, or the 36% of the global population not encompassed by the G20). Others suggested that the G20 was actually something of a ‘G2’ or ‘G4’ and yet other critics pointed to the fact that the institution is actually, at best, of marginal importance in global affairs. Meanwhile, the WTO is in limbo as the Doha Development Agenda has reached an impasse, and calls for further democratisation of the IMF and World Bank grow ever louder. The UN makes slow but meaningful progress in moving towards a post-Kyoto agreement with the Cop-15 process, whilst being stymied in other policy arenas, and all the while, other processes of regional and global governance – the EU, Caricom, ALBA, Mercosur, the African Union the OECD, the G7/8 etc. – move onwards in a variety of complex ways. As such, the purpose of papers in Track 9 should be to explore the different processes of regional and global structural reconfiguration, and attempt to make critical sense of what they mean for broader processes of international governance and development.