Global Governance and the Double Movement

Abstract

Abstract This article reconstructs the evolution of global governance through time, in a perspective organized around Karl Polanyi’s double movement. Starting from present-day global governance, the article reaches back in time to understand the different socially and historically contingent layers that have constituted it as a discourse and a set of practices. It argues based on the notion that global governance is a hegemonic discourse of world politics, and claims that it is so because it has become inclusive enough to accommodate both the “movement” and the “countermovement” in its cognitive and material structures. In this order of knowledge, the “healthy functioning” of the global economy always precedes the existence of prosperous societies, and comes before maintaining harmony in the ecosystem. This order sustains the active-reactive dynamics of the double movement and limits the possibilities of change in global governance.