Can you briefly introduce the Global Governance Research Centre Consortium and what it sets out to do?

The Global Governance Research Centre Consortium — or GGRCC, a mouthful, yes, though we are used to alphabet soups in this field — is a network of peer research centres, all working on global governance broadly defined. It was established as a partnership between six founding research centres: the Global Governance Centre here at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland; the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur la Gouvernance Mondiale at Université Laval in Canada; the Stockholm Centre for Global Governance at Stockholm University in Sweden; the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Italy; the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University in the United States; and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California San Diego, also in the United States. Together, these institutions represent some of the most respected names in the field. Our mission is to foster independent research and support researchers that address the most pressing challenges in global governance now and into the future.

What motivated the creation of this consortium at this particular moment?

The timing is no accident. Global governance has been under sustained pressure from both longer-run structural transformations and recent acute disruptions: the shifting distribution of global power, the erosion of multilateral consensus, and the strains placed on international institutions by the pandemic, climate change, AI. Yet these and other global, international, or transnational challenges have not diminished. If anything, they have become more urgent. We felt that the research community working on these questions needed a stronger, more coordinated infrastructure -- and the Institute’s direction agreed, providing much-needed support to formally establish this consortium. By bringing together six leading centres into a sustained partnership, we hope to gather scholars and produce scholarship that can speak to policymakers, practitioners, and the broader public at precisely the moment when rigorous, critical, reflexive, and innovative research in this field is most needed.

What makes this collaboration between these six centres distinctive?

Perhaps the most distinctive feature is that this is a collaboration at the level of research centres themselves, not simply a network built on the personal relationships of individual scholars. That distinction matters enormously. Individual networks, however impressive, depend on specific people remaining in specific posts and tend to reflect particular research agendas or methodological traditions. By anchoring the GGRCC at the level of centres, we create something at once more pluralistic and more durable. It means we can encompass multiple research agendas, literatures, and methodological approaches under one roof, which is essential in a field as broad as global governance. The six founding centres were chosen because they represent institutions with deep, sustained commitments to global governance research, and a strong and diverse critical mass, upon which the GGRCC can grow in both geographic reach and intellectual breadth.

How will the consortium benefit researchers, particularly early-career scholars?

Supporting early-career researchers is one of the areas I feel most strongly about, and it is where a network like this can make an immediate, tangible difference. What the GGRCC can offer early-career researchers is access: to broader networks, to peers at similar career stages, to senior scholars outside their home institutions, and to research environments beyond the one in which they complete their training. We envision facilitating doctoral students' fieldwork or dissertation write-up periods at partner centres, helping to identify mentors and external examiners from across the network, and promoting postdoctoral mobility between member institutions. We are also looking to set up online work-in-progress sessions, a relatively low-cost intervention that can be enormously valuable for researchers who want broader visibility and opportunities to obtain feedback on their research. And perhaps just as importantly, we want to help early-career researchers connect with one another: to organise conference panels together, to identify co-authors, and to build the collegial relationships that sustain a research career over the long term. The next generation of scholars should feel that global governance is a supportive, inspiring, and important field, and that the GGRCC is their network too.

You’ve been elected as the founding president. What are your priorities for the first year?

I am genuinely honoured to have been elected as the founding president of this consortium. I want to be frank though: this first year is necessarily a year of foundation-building rather than dramatic announcements. One of the things that struck me most in the process of establishing the GGRCC was just how different our six partner centres are from one another — different in size, in institutional culture, in research focus, in how they relate to their parent universities. That diversity is a strength, but it also means that my first priority has to be listening: getting to know the working practices of each partner more deeply and identifying the synergies that will genuinely add value, both to each member centre and their members, and to the broader global governance research community.

I am also enormously grateful to have a wonderful board of inspiring scholars and leaders, all directors of research centres, who are generously sharing solutions and support. We’ve set up working groups to develop sensible and sustainable working practices, and give the online event series a distinctively GGRCC character that will build a community to underpin everything else we do. This will create solid ground for what is to come. 

Everyone can learn more at www.ggrcc.org, which hosts links to events, blogs, podcasts, and working paper series from across the partner centres, and from our LinkedIn page, which people can follow to get the flow of outputs and opportunities emerging from the network.