Multilateral governance

Since the creation of United Nations system, actors in world politics have relied even more on the construction of multilateral agreements to face collective challenges. Such a tendency accelerated in the 1970s and has become a wide, complex and variegated reality since the end of the Cold War. It is for this reason that since the early 1990s IR scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the concept of ‘multilateralism’. So much so that it would be difficult today to confirm James Caporaso’s statement of 1992 that ‘the treatment of multilateralism in the scholarly international relations literature is less than would be expected on the basis of its observed importance in the world’ (Caporaso 1992: 600). Scholarship first debated the concept of multilateralism with an aim to identify its peculiarities with respect to a generic form of cooperation among states; it later devoted attention to the study multilateral cooperation in specific thematic areas. More recently, scholars have questioned whether the faith in multilateralism is misplaced and more broadly in the institutions of global governance in a world characterized by the rise of emerging powers as well as transnational actors. However, it is difficult to affirm that after so much research, the concept has become less vague: it is used with very different meanings and refers to very different institutional forms of interaction. This chapter deals with the concept utility of the concept of multilateralism today. The first section examines the early evolution of the practice of multilateralism and the first definitions; the second then turns to the more recent evolution of the global governance; and the third section evaluates the challenges that global governance currently poses to the institution of multilateralism.