Social Sciences in China

Vol. 38, No. 1, 2017

Towards a Public Management Paradigm for Global Governance: An Analysis Based on an Issue-Actor-Mechanism Framework

(Abstract)

Xue Lan and Yu Hanzhi

The concept of global governance first appeared in research on international political governance in the early 1990s. At the time much of the theoretical research on global governance was to some extent isolated from the realities of world development, but since the beginning of the 21th century, global governance research has been turning to real world issues, We propose the construction, from a public management perspective, of a governance “issue-actor-mechanism” framework. This sees postwar global governance practice as the old paradigm. The paper points out that the rapid global development after the end of the Cold War has had a crucial impact on the traditional governance paradigm, followed by the emergence of new global governance issues and changes in new governance actors resulting from the changing world of the last twenty or thirty years which have led to the failure of traditional governance mechanisms. These “issue-actor-mechanism” changes are closely interlocked, and hence require a new global governance paradigm that can reflect the complex interconnections of governance issues, actors and mechanisms. We thus need to reexamine and refresh our perceptions of the world and open up a new research agenda.

Keywords: global governance, public management, issue-actor-mechanism framework, paradigm shift, world changes