ABSTRACT
One of the great ironies of the demonstrations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle in late 1999 is that the massive protests against one form of globalization were facilitated by another dimension of the same processthe revolution in information and communications technologies. Just as these technologies have helped corporations go global, so have they facilitated powerful new forms of international activism by citizens' groups: "The Internet has become the latest, greatest arrow in our quiver of social activism," Mike Dolan, an organizer of the Seattle protests, told the Los Angeles Times.l
As the breakdown of the Seattle talks demonstrated, civil society has become strong enough to stop global economic negotiations in their tracks. But the more important question may be whether it can now harness that strength to build a new kind of global governance from the ground up. A nascent system of international environmental governance is already beginning to emerge from diverse quarters, proving that governance is no longer just for governments.
