Transcript
MR. STROBE TALBOTT: Governance is a word that has become both fashionable and controversial in recent years; controversial particularly if the adjective "global" is attached to it. There are some parts of our political spectrum in this country where if you say the words global governance, people imagine blue helmets and maybe black helicopters. And there are also parts of the political spectrum where global governance has a ring of panacea and utopia about it.
Here at this institution and next door at the Endowment we take both the word governance and the phrase global governance very seriously indeed. Jessica will speak for herself on this in due course, but I think there's probably a consensus among us here that governance, while it subsumes the more common word "government," is actually much broader and has many more dimensions to it than government per se. Governance, at least in my own personal dictionary, means all those many ways in which we organize ourselves, regulate ourselves, and set up our associations in a way to make our various communities work better and also to advance the interests of individuals in a way that is compatible with the many communities of which they are a part.
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