Divided Nations ─ Why Global Governance Is Failing, and What We Can Do About It

The UN, World Bank, and the IMF were all created in a post-war world radically different from today's. It is becoming increasingly apparent that these global structures are struggling to cope with the challenges faced by the globalized, interconnected world of the twenty-first century.

Rapid global integration and urbanization together with game-changing leaps that have globalized technology, communications, mobility, and business, all bring profound advantages, but they also bring systemic risks that are only just being identified and understood. Many of the biggest challenges today's world faces spill over national
boundaries: climate change, finance, pandemics, cyber security, and migration. And the hard truth is that our global governing bodies--created in the 1940s--are simply not up to the task of managing such risks.

As a former Vice President of the World Bank, and head of the multi-disciplinary Oxford Martin School of Oxford University, Ian Goldin is in a superb position to provide new perspectives and approaches to our world order. He explores whether the answer is to reform the existing structures or to consider a new and radical way of tackling inherent failings.

In this groundbreaking work, he sets out the nature of the problems and the various approaches to global governance, highlights the challenges that we are to overcome, and considers a roadmap for the future.

Ian Goldin is the Director of Oxford University's Oxford Martin School, Oxford University Professor of Globalization and Development and Professorial Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. From 2001 to 2006 he was at the World Bank, first as Director of Policy and then as Vice President. He has written fifteen books, including Globalization for Development: Meeting New Challenges and Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define our Future.