Global governance has reached a new cross road since the world moved into the new century. A series of mechanisms and institutions within the global governance system have lost part of their efficiency; meanwhile a set of new mechanisms established since the beginning of the new century somehow haven’t got institutionalized and functioned well yet. The number of issues faced by the world today urged nations to make efforts to improve the system in order to better address the challenges under the new situation. Nevertheless, countries especially the big powers so far haven’t been able to reach a common understanding in general terms on what approach should be adopted to improve the current system. It appears that the world only super power, the United States, is in favour of a conventional approach, which basically means that the U.S. still plays a major role in global rules-making, while other countries across the globe are mostly in a position of being the rule-takers; or we can also assume that the U.S. may just need a little longer time to finally recognize that a fairer and more balanced global governance approach, rather than a traditional approach, should be more suitable to both the U.S. and other countries.

In the meantime, some developing countries and emerging economies, as well as those smaller developed countries with great potential and strength in special issue areas would prefer to have fairer and more balanced participation in regional and global affairs.

Some developing countries and smaller industrialized nations have been making efforts to promote the democratization of international relations for decades already. Certain progresses have been made. The establishment of the Group of Twenty (G20) mechanism can be a good example to represent a big progress of the global governance system. Through the G20 mechanism, developing and developed countries finally stand together to deal with common challenges in the global economic and financial area.

More progress in promoting the democratization of international relations in the coming years will need to be made, given that the world has been changing and the changes in a wide range of issue areas require an increasing and more balanced participation from both developing and developed states as well as from the non-state actors.

Though there could be numerous factors - such as problems existed in certain international organizations or other various transnational actors - that have affected the improvement of the global governance system. Instead of focusing on the exploration of all kinds of factors in great details, this analysis would aim to, from a broader and structural perspective, assess the impacts of state actors, in particular, the major powers on the global governance system. In other words, it would attempt to observe how the various approaches - a unilateral and hegemonic approach or a fairer and more cooperative approach - taken by the major powers have affected and would continue to significantly affect the global efforts in improving the global governance system.

To do that, it would assume a view that a hegemonic approach taken by the U.S., instead of contributing to global governance, should be one of the main causes for having slowed down the process of improving global governance. This analytical piece would tend to suggest a possible solution for overcoming the issues that have constrained the cooperation among major powers. Before doing that, it would firstly give a brief historical overview of the development of global governance since the end of WWII.

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