This chapter puts the topic of global governance in the context of governance and governance systems more generally. Although global governance has many special features and is indeed the most complex and also a frequently contested governance system, it nonetheless shares many basic principles and performance criteria with other forms of managing public problems, be they at the national or the local level or designed for one policy field or another. Global governance is set apart by the legitimacy of international or supranational government given the growing interdependence of formally sovereign nation-states; the institutionalization of measures for global problem-solving, especially regarding the challenges of transgressions and voids; and the specific nature of innovation in a system yet to gain levels of capacity and readiness to cope with the task of managing a globalized world. This chapter addresses these and related issues of global governance in turn.