This article takes seriously the proposition that ideas and concepts, both good and bad, have an impact on international public policy. It situates the emergence of governance, good governance and global governance, as well as the UN's role in the conceptual process. Although 'governance' is as old as human history, this essay concentrates on the intellectual debates of the 1980s and 1990s but explores such earlier UN-related ideas as decolonisation, localisation and human rights, against which more recent thinking has been played out. A central analytical perspective is the tension between many academics and international practitioners who employ 'governance' to connote a complex set of structures and processes, both public and private, while more popular writers tend to use it synonymously with 'government'.

Governance, good governance and global governance: conceptual and actual challenges

Health literacy as a discrete form of literacy is becoming increasingly important for social, economic and health development. The positive and multiplier effects of education and general literacy on population health, particularly women's health, are well known and researched. However, a closer analysis of the current HIV/AIDS epidemics, especially in Africa, indicates a complex interface between general literacy and health literacy. While general literacy is an important determinant of health, it is not sufficient to address the major health challenges facing developing and developed societies. As a contribution to the health literacy forum in Health Promotion International, this paper reviews concepts and definitions of literacy and health literacy, and raises conceptual, measurement and strategic challenges. It proposes to develop a set of indicators to quantify health literacy using the experience gained in national literacy surveys around the world. A health literacy index could become an important composite measure of the outcome of health promotion and prevention activities, could document the health competence and capabilities of the population of a given country, community or group and relate it to a set of health, social and economic outcomes.

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Health literacy: addressing the health and education divide

How can we account for the global diffusion of remarkably similar policy innovations across widely differing nation-states? In an era characterized by heightened globalization and increasingly radical state restructuring, this question has become especially acute. Scholars of international relations offer a number of theoretical explanations for the cross-national convergence of ideas, institutions, and interests. We examine the proliferation of state bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming. These organizations seek to integrate a gender-equality perspective across all areas of government policy. Although they so far have received scant attention outside of feminist policy circles, these mainstreaming bureaucracies—now in place in over 100 countries—represent a powerful challenge to business-as-usual politics and policymaking. As a policy innovation, the speed with which these institutional mechanisms have been adopted by the majority of national governments is unprecedented. We argue that transnational networks composed largely of nonstate actors (notably women's international nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations) have been the primary forces driving the diffusion of gender mainstreaming. In an event history analysis of 157 nation-states from 1975 to 1998, we assess how various national and transnational factors have affected the timing and the type of the institutional changes these states have made. Our findings support the claim that the diffusion of gender-mainstreaming mechanisms has been facilitated by the role played by transnational networks, in particular by the transnational feminist movement. Further, they suggest a major shift in the nature and the locus of global politics and national policymaking.

Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming

Global and transnational challenges figure ever more prominently on national and international policy agendas and are increasingly analysed as global public goods (GPGs). This timely collection, which includes contributions by eminent scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines, provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the theoretical and empirical research on this topic, and suggestions on where scholarship could go next.

Global Public Goods

This paper presents a perfect foresight model of speculative attacks on emerging markets. Credit constrained governments are assumed to have two objectives: to accumulate liquid assets in order to self-insure against shocks to national consumption and to insure poorly regulated domestic financial markets. This policy regime generates endogenous fiscal deficits defined to include the growth of contingent liabilities. The model sets out a sequence of yield differentials consistent with capital inflows followed by anticipated speculative attacks. The model suggests that a common shock generated capital inflows to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America after 1989.

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A Model of Crises in Emerging Markets

Edited by the United Nations Development Programme, this collection of papers offers a new rationale and framework for international development cooperation. Its main argument is that in actual practice development cooperation has already moved beyond aid. In the name of aid (i.e. assistance to poor countries), we are today dealing with issues such as the ozone hole, global climate change, HIV, drug trafficking and financial volatility. All of these issues are not really poverty-related. Rather, they concern global housekeeping: ensuring an adequate provision of global public goods.

Global public goods : international cooperation in the 21st century

In his 1972 Janeway Lectures at Princeton, James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel Prize winner for economics, submitted a proposal for a levy on international currency transactions. The idea was not greeted with enthusiasm, as the 1970s were a period of optimism and confidence in floating exchange rages. Yet, whenever currency crises erupted during the past decades, the proposal for a levy on international currency transactions would once again arise. In the 1990s, two additional facts have sharpened interest in the Tobin tax proposal. First is the growing volume of foreign exchange trading. Second, interest is coming not only from policymakers and experts concerned with the smooth functioning of financial markets. It is shared by those concerned with public financing of development-the fiscal crisis of the state as well as the growing need for international cooperation on problems such as the environment, poverty, peace and security. This work makes a systematic analysis of the proposal for a foreign exchange transactions levy. Its chapters examine the economic desirability of such a levy, its technical and political feasibility, its revenue potential, the possible uses of that revenue, and related administrative and institutional aspects.

The Tobin tax : coping with financial volatility

Defining Global Public Goods

Global Public Goods Concepts, Policies and Strategies

Why is globalization not improving the lot of millions of the world's poor? Indeed, the number of poor people at the beginning of this new century is the same as in 1987, and poverty is rising in most developing countries. The deliberate aim of international organizations was to advance and promote development through globalization -in particular through higher levels of international trade and investment for the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, while the United Nations would promote well-coordinated and coherent policies at the national and international levels. Globalization in turn was expected to deliver higher degrees of welfare for all. We are now at a critical juncture where this link, the expectation that globalization creates higher welfare for all, is called into question. The current reappraisal was in part prompted by the world financial crisis of 1997-1998, and clearly manifested itself in the turmoil surrounding the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. A new agenda is therefore opening up for the international community: What kind of governance do we need for globalization with a human face? What kind of architecture for the world financial system, what kind of framework for global trade? What rules of the game to protect the weak and the poor? This book aims to illuminate these questions by presenting some of the most important debates that have taken place at the United Nations, especially at its recent Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meetings, covering the themes of globalization, financial architecture, trade, poverty, global indicators, and the nexus between security, economic, and social affairs.

Isabelle Grunberg

Papers

Global public goods : international cooperation in the 21st century

The Tobin tax : coping with financial volatility

Defining Global Public Goods

Global Public Goods Concepts, Policies and Strategies

Globalization : the United Nations Development Dialogue : finance, trade, poverty, peace-building