The Global Governance perspective seeks to examine gaps in the international system for managing complex issues and to engage stakeholders on practical steps for collective problem-solving. It pays particular attention to informing successful multilateral negotiations on creating or reforming global institutions, and to engaging more effectively new transnational actors from the private sector and civil society.

Making global governance work is a defining challenge of our time, given that too often international leaders fail to agree on, let alone pursue, concerted action to address pressing transnational problems at the intersection of peace, security and justice.

The Hague Institute engages governments, international organizations, the business community, and civil society to create partnerships for policy dialogue and research, capacity-building, and the exchange of knowledge.

By generating innovative, demand-driven solutions derived from evidenced-based research, this program aims to improve global collective action by strengthening institutions, networks, and ideas across borders and professional disciplines.

Thematic Focus and Projects

Global Governance Reform

In a rapidly globalizing world, virtually everything is in flow: Information, trade, finances, and people. Good global governance can serve as a beacon that helps us negotiate these rapids of contemporary human interaction. The Institute makes policy recommendations to overcome global governance challenges by improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy of collective actions undertaken by relevant stakeholders.

Global Business, Labor, and Economic Governance

The core theme Global Justice through Business, Labor, and Economic Governance focus on the role of the private sector, labor, and multilateral economic institutions (for example, the G20, ASEAN, the EU, the WTO, and the UN system including the IFIs, ILO, and WIPO) in strengthening the peace-security-justice nexus, including by advancing and shaping global norms and principles as well as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Activities are undertaken under this theme aim to improve the global governance of economic factors – including trade, financial flows, labor, and intellectual property – by fostering innovation as well as by maximizing these factors to advance global peace, security, and justice (for example, by strengthening the role of international institutions in the transfer and utilization of climate-friendly technologies in developing countries). The role of climate change as a threat multiplier that places human security and the global economy at risk is a cross-cutting element of global governance that will frequently feature in research activities conducted within this pillar. In addition, this core theme will prioritize migration management, including vis-à-vis the current refugee and internally displaced persons crisis.

Global Security, Justice, and Governance

The project departs from the insight that no single state or group of states can manage current and emerging global challenges on their own. Since uncertain governance begets insecurity and insecurity is a gateway to injustice, a renewed effort to upgrade the global governance architecture so as to manage interdependence effectively, justly, and with strategic vision is both a moral and a practical imperative. Security, justice, and governance are inextricably linked.