Global Governance Reform: The Imperatives of a New Global Economic Reality

Johannes F. Linn, Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the Wolfensohn Center for Development, discussed issues of global governance reform by looking into the imperatives of a new global economic reality at a distinguished speaker seminar at The Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, Japan on March 5, 2008.

Linn started the lecture by noting three major points. First, the world now faces dramatic shifts in distribution of global powers and pressing global challenges. Second, international institutions established after World War II are fragile and lack legitimacy in responding to these challenges and shifts. Third, far-reaching reforms based on a new set of values are needed to create architecture of legitimate global institutions, which will be representative, relevant, and effective. Then, he raised a key question: Do we have the collective capacity and will to change or can only a global crisis bring about change?

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