| Summary/Abstract |
Ever since global governance was introduced to the discipline of International Relations (IR), it has been criticised for its conceptual vagueness and ambiguity. In fact, how to even speak and think global governance – whether as a mere description of world politics, as a theoretical perspective to explain it, or as a normative notion to be realised through global policy – remains unclear. The article argues that this confusion exists not because of a lack of debate but rather because of the multiple understandings of global governance that are continuously advanced and implicitly reproduced within these debates. These different, partially overlapping and partially contradicting understandings constitute global governance as a ‘floating signifier’. It is argued that precisely because of this, global governance has obtained its ‘celebrity status’ within and beyond IR. Advancing a singular definition of global governance thus appears to be an arbitrary exercise as well as unnecessary disciplining. Rather than reducing global governance to a singular meaning, the debate in and of global governance would benefit from more self-reflected awareness as to when and how different concepts and understandings of it are invoked. To provide a framework for this, the article structures the different meanings of global governance by offering a taxonomy of different global governance applications.
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