Shifting Authority of Actors in Global Economic Governance

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the organizational and policymaking shifts influenced the authority of actors in global economic governance. This indicates that decentralizing strategic, political, and cognitive authority has significantly influenced actor hierarchies in the global economic architecture, especially since the GFC. This aspect of decentralizing authority leading to destabilizing actor hierarchies has been particularly significant for global development and financial governance, principally since the GFC. The chapter indicates how these effects were constituted through the strategic, political, and cognitive agency of actors. On the question of whether these shifts in the global economic architecture constituted a ‘post-Western’ world, while there has been what might be called a partial rebalancing due to decentralizing authority, nevertheless, the leading Western states, especially the G7, remain highly influential.