Beyond Gridlock: How Global Governance Continues to Shape our World

In 2013, Thomas Hale, the late David Held and Kevin Young published Gridlock. Their book made sense of a widely shared perception. The edifice of global governance, this perception suggested, had begun to crumble under a range of pressures. The empirical evidence that lay beneath this perception was puzzling not only in a normative, but also in an analytical sense. It did not seem to match the demand for international institutions, which was the most central factor scholars pointed to when they had to explain the emergence, changes and effects of international institutions. The subtitle of Hale, Held and Young’s neatly summarised what was at stake. What had to be explained was ‘why global cooperation is failing when we need it most’. The three titles reviewed in this essay challenge this view. They suggest that many international organisations continue to do their everyday work (Dolowitz et al.), that many informal global governance institutions have been added (Roger), and that various forms of ‘ebb and flow’ have been a constant in global governance since 1850 (Grigorescu).