Global governance is the system of institutions, norms, and rules that coordinate collective action beyond the nation-state. This system isn’t a single, centralized authority, but a diverse ecosystem of actors.

While scholars debate its scope, GGI views global governance broadly to include:

• Formal structures: International organizations (IOs), treaties, and legal frameworks (Rosenau 1995; Pevehouse & von Borzyskowski 2017).
• Informal structures: Transnational coalitions and networks, private-sector partnerships, and civil society actors (Barnett et al. 2021).

States and IOs remain anchors of this ecosystem but increasingly collaborate with an “ensemble cast” of NGOs, corporations, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. GGI focuses on how these diverse actors cooperate and coordinate authority to achieve collective action, recognizing that governance occurs through multiple, overlapping pathways.