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Introduction to
Global Issues
VINAY BHARGAVA

M

ore than at any other time in history, the future of humankind is
being shaped by issues that are beyond any one nation’s ability
to solve. Climate change, avian flu, financial instability, terrorism, waves of
migrants and refugees, water scarcities, disappearing fisheries, stark andseemingly intractable poverty—all of these are examples of global issues whose
solution requires cooperation among nations. Each issue seems at first to be
little connected to the next; the problems appear to come in all shapes and
from all directions. But if one reflects a moment on these examples, some
common features soon become apparent:
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Each issue affects a large number ofpeople on different sides of
national boundaries.
Each issue is one of significant concern, directly or indirectly, to all or
most of the countries of the world, often as evidenced by a major U.N.
declaration or the holding of a global conference on the issue.
Each issue has implications that require a global regulatory approach;
no one government has the power or the authority to impose asolution, and market forces alone will not solve the problem.

These commonalities amount almost to a definition of “global issue,” and
awareness of them will help throughout this book in identifying other such
issues besides those named above. First, however, a few other definitions and
distinctions will further clarify just what we mean by global issues.

I would like to thank Cinnamon Dornsife,Michael Treadway, Jean-François Rischard, and Asli
Gurkan for their advice and comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Global Issues for Global Citizens

Some Definitions
Global issues, globalization, and global public goods are related but differing
concepts. Globalization generally refers to the increasing integration ofeconomies around the world, particularly through trade, production chains
(where parts for a final good, such as an automobile, are produced in one
country and assembled in another), and financial flows. The term increasingly
also refers to the movement of people and of information (including not only
financial and other raw data but ideas, fashions, and culture as well) across
internationalborders. Globalization can be understood as a driving force
affecting many global issues, from migration to fair trade to debt relief.
The concept of global public goods is a more recent one, and indeed its
dimensions and implications are still being worked out by researchers and
policy analysts. The International Task Force on Global Public Goods has
defined “international public goods” (a termthat includes both global and
regional public goods) as goods and services that “address issues that: (i) are
deemed to be important to the international community, to both developed
and developing countries; (ii) typically cannot, or will not, be adequately
addressed by individual countries or entities acting alone; and, in such cases
(iii) are best addressed collectively on a multilateralbasis.”1 By this definition,
most but not all of the global issues addressed in this book involve the creation
of—or the failure to create—global public goods. We will return to the topic
of global public goods later in the chapter.

What Global Issues Do We Face Today?
Global issues are present in all areas of our lives as citizens of the world. They
affect our economies, our environment,our capabilities as humans, and our
processes for making decisions regarding cooperation at the global level
(which this book will call global governance). These issues often turn out to be
interconnected, although they may not seem so at first. For example, energy
consumption drives climate change, which in turn threatens marine fisheries
through changes in ocean temperature and chemistry,...