ABSTRACT
This chapter covers a lot of ground and touched on many issues in considering the range of challenges that global structures of governance faced in the first decade or so of this century. It considers the issues that were being contested within global economic governance at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s across what were the three main policy domains of this period finance, trade and the environment. This financial globalisation was what made possible the financial-crisis contagion of the 1990s that culminated in East Asia. Trade as a sphere of global economic governance had been given a new internal momentum by the establishment within the World Trade Organization (WTO) of a biennial Ministerial Conference which of itself acted to push forward the ongoing process of negotiation. The Geneva Ministerial took place in May 1998 at a time when the consequences of the East Asian financial crisis were working their way through the global political economy.
