New World New Rules: Global Cooperation in a World of Geopolitical Rivalries

The need for collective action has never been greater, but geopolitics, structural changes and diverging preferences mean that existing global governance arrangements, devised at Bretton Woods in the 1940s, are either unravelling or outmoded. Reconciling this contradiction is today’s pressing global policy challenge.

In this short book, two of Europe’s most-experienced policymakers and analysts outline a new agenda for global governance. They examine governance practices across several key policy areas - climate, health, trade and competition, banking and finance, taxation, migration and the digital economy - and consider what works and what doesn’t, and why. The global governance solutions they put forward are ambitious but pragmatic. They require complexity, flexibility and compromise. Attributes that global governments are demonstrably short of, but today’s global crises urgently demand.

George Papaconstantinou is the Acting Director of the Florence School of Transnational Governance, EUI Dean of Executive Education and holds the Chair of International Political economy. He was formerly Greek Finance Minister in the government of George Papandreou and played a key role in the Greek debt crisis, negotiating the first bailout with the EU and the IMF.

Jean Pisani-Ferry is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po, Paris, a Senior Fellow at Bruegel, the European think tank, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC.