Max Weber Programme Multidisciplinary Workshop
In recent years, the concept of glocal governance has become a useful tool for describing the increasing interaction between global and local levels of governing. Used by practitioners and academics, the glocal signifies a governing space in which global norms and actors influence local legal and political processes and in which local agency and autonomy impact the global governance discourse. For example, the City Council of Florence or of Nairobi uses the guidelines developed by the UN in shaping a public policy on urban green spaces, and thus directly links local governing with the global governance processes.
However, depending on the local context in which the same principles are applied, there will be a variety of possible paths and modalities, ranging from agency, to competencies, to organizational modes, to political and economic roles.
Conversely, local models of governing are sometimes used as exemplars for global governance, from 'solidarity cities' that support asylum seekers and refugees to municipalities that take novel approaches to climate change and urban transport management.
We can observe this potentially transformative approach in the fields of sustainability, human rights, emerging technologies, urban planning, climate change and others. In these instances, the national level of governance is not always seen as central for tackling the environmental, social and economic issues that have a global and local dimension.
The concept of glocal governance, therefore, allows us to focus on the mutual exchange between the global and the local levels of governing. It also permits us to critically evaluate the effects that the global-local flow of practices, values and norms has on the daily lives of citizens and its potential for challenging the exclusion and inequality within global and local law-and-policy-making.