From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERGLOBAL GOVERNANCE IN THETWENTY-FIRST CENTURYThe twenty-first century will be characterised by growing economicintegration and shifting power balances among nations: the slow declineof the post- Second World War powers; the inexorable rise of new powerssuch as China and India; the increased role of regional and sub-regionalblocs such as the African Union, Comesa (East and Southern Africa),Caricom (Caribbean),or ASEAN (East Asia); and the sometimes precipitatecollapse of poor countries on the margins of these tectonic shifts.The institutions of global governance were built on an order that israpidly eroding,and will have to evolve to keep pace with new challenges.With all its limitations, global governance holds out the promise ofbuilding some fairness and predictability into international relationsby reining in the powerful, ensuring that poor nations have sufficientpolicy space and resources to work their way out of poverty, and helpingthe most vulnerable. The challenge is to make sure that globalgovernance resembles a safety net more than it does a trap.The current institutions of global governance fall far short offulfilling that hope: the UN struggles to reform itself into the kind ofeffective organisation that can implement its newly agreed ‘responsibilityto protect’; the World Bank and the IMF remain in the grip of a largelyoutdated and ideological economic doctrine that does great harm inmany countries, and the same goes for the WTO; aid agencies moveslowly to overcome their inefficiencies and to spend new aid money inways that strengthen, and do not undermine, fledgling democracies.424