ABSTRACT
Introduction The progressive integration of the global economy through the liberalisation of the trade regime, the deregulation of financial markets and the privatisation of state assets has led to what we now commonly call ‘globalisation’. But this development of the global economy has not been accompanied by a comparable development of the global polity, and it is now becoming increasingly recognised in both scholarly and policy circles that, without the development of norms, institutions and processes to manage many of the advantages that globalisation has brought (see Wolf 2004 and Bhagwati 2004), globalisation could be undone by a failure to mitigate the excesses and negative consequences (especially for large sections of the world’s poor) that emanate from globalisation (see Krugman 2001; Bello 2004; Stiglitz 2002; Stiglitz and Charlton 2006). This is a wellunderstood conundrum.
