On ‘Good Global Governance’, Institutional Design, and the Practices of Moral Agency

Abstract

Usually, we inherit our institutions. Most of the processes by which we attend to our social and political arrangements (and indeed, many others) are the results of many hands over many years and so it would be excessive to call them ‘designed’. Constructed they certainly may be, but consciously ‘designed’ only rarely. This is as true of the formal institutions that are the focus of this volume (NATO, the UN, etc.) as it is of informal ones (the balance of power, war), though it is perhaps more clearly observable in the latter case than in the former. However, periods of radical change are often held to represent a departure from this pattern. Many writers have emphasized, for example, that internally, within states, periods of great social turmoil, even revolution, are precisely those periods that display the greatest amount of institutional innovation.¹ And the growing body of work that has been undertaken recently on the construction of new international orders after major wars suggests that a similar view is becoming much more common within international relations than might once have been the case.²

I am grateful to all the participants in the BISA/ISA Joint Special Workshop, ‘Can Institutions have Morals?’, held at the University of Cambridge, 17– 19 November 2000, for the arresting and fascinating discussions we had. I am especially grateful to Toni Erskine, Chris Brown, Mervyn Frost, Onora O’Neill, and my colleagues at St Andrews, especially Mark Imber, Oliver Richmond, and William Walker for discussions about the character and fate of international institutions as well as comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.