Managing Shocks: Connecting Regional and Global Responses Past and Present

A Research Collaboration between Oxford Martin School programme: ‘Changing Global Orders’ and UNU-CRIS

“As we consider ways to make multilateral institutions more effective, and to meet the current and future challenges facing people and planet, we need the perspectives and engagement of local and regional authorities.”

(Statement by UN Secretary-General Guterres at the launch of a new Advisory Group on Local and Regional Governments. United Nations, 6 October 2023)

What spaces do regional institutions/actors occupy in the management of shocks and crises and in the debates about the creation of new international orders?

Shocks to the international system are regular occurrences that can seriously disrupt prevailing international orders, yet when they happen nobody seems prepared. One only needs to think of recent events in the Middle East and Ukraine, the effects of the global pandemic, or the ongoing climate crisis to illustrate the point. So much energy goes into designing and improving global governance structures, that this absence of preparation seems strange. This workshop will explore the evolving nexus between global or ‘universal’ and regional institutions and argue that regional bodies are vital and often under-recognized elements in shock management and mitigation. Their past, present and future contributions to designing new global orders and finding solutions to pressing global problems need to be taken more seriously.

The workshop will build upon the wider remit of the Oxford Martin School (OMS) programme, Changing Global Orders, in demonstrating how shock management can benefit from closer institutional study and applying the lessons of history to contemporary crises. Most crises have important antecedents and are often preceded by periods of turbulence, hence historical approaches and learning can help to untangle their origins and inform future pathways and policies. Beyond history, however, the workshop seeks to disaggregate different responses to shocks and their management over time and propose that regional institutions play important, albeit often understudied roles.

Such disaggregation is particularly important in a fast-changing world order where the rise of new ‘regional powers’ beyond the West points to a global landscape of multipolarity, where older multilateral institutions are challenged. The most critical point is that the ‘we’ now involved in global governance has changed in fundamental ways. Reactions to the war in Ukraine and to the conflict in Palestine from across many parts of the Global South are a reminder that simple-minded assumptions about the indivisibility of peace or the universality of liberal values occlude a much more complex picture, especially in a world characterised by both deep diversity and historical inequalities and stratification. This is not a new phenomenon. As part of a deep-rooted historical process, there has been a diffusion of agency and the capacity of a far wider range of states, social groups, and societies across the different regions of the world to lay claim to cultural recognition and to demand changes in the legal and institutional structure of international society.

Globalisation has multiplied the voices IOs and INGOs need to listen to, yet at the same time radically differentiated them. The contestation of globalization is taking place within the context of a power shift (including but not only to China) and a justice shift (with new justice claims emerging across many different parts of the world). Only by researching the changing character of power, geopolitical relations, and the importance of deep regional diversity amid high connectivity, can we find a way through the fundamental challenge facing the management of future shocks: namely, why an emphasis on supposedly ‘shared’ global challenges has faltered in the past, and risks our future.

Major shock or crisis management is typically approached at a macro level. Depending on the shock – financial, health, environmental or security - the question is which global institution is best placed to deal with it. Yet throughout the last 100 years regional actors and institutions have played significant, if often under-recognised roles in shock management and institutional redesign, whether supporting, challenging or complementing global governance structures or acting solo. Managing crisis is therefore a hybrid or multilevel affair. In recent decades, multiple regional organizations, in Europe, Asia, Africa or Latin America, have all played major roles in crisis management reflecting both the limitations on global institutions and the preferences of regional actors devising solutions for regional problems. In considering the regional-global nexus past and present this workshop aims to demonstrate how shock management and the production of more stable orders depends upon better connecting regional and global responses.

Drawing on scholars from Oxford’s OMS programme, from the United Nations University (UNU) network and other international partners, this workshop will examine regional approaches over time and the intersections between the regional and global governance, to explore what has been learned from past practice and how future global governance can be enhanced by more constructive engagement. Workshop participants will consider different theoretical approaches to understanding the regional-global nexus; how that nexus has looked historically; and a set of contemporary themes and cases particularly pertinent to demonstrating its salience. The aim is to bring scholarly analysis of the regional-global nexus into policy-relevant settings.

This event is by invitation only.