Some cities and regions have untapped resources which should lift their growth and enhance their attractiveness. Detroit and Greece however are examples of places where the process of decline itself has to be managed, perhaps for a long time, before there will be growth. Regeneration in other places which have suffered economic and structural shocks highlight the kinds of things that most cities and regions can do to generate new sources of growth. Case studies and theory are congruent, but still leave politicians with decisions to take about more extreme situations of decline when recovery seems hopeless.

Maurice Strong organised two Earth summits. The first was held in Stockholm in 1972 and resulted in the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme, which, after the summit, Strong headed. The second was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. These summits promoted the principle that development did not have to be sacrificed to protect the environment. Under the rubric of sustainable development, Strong built support for the environmental agenda among developing and developed countries.Unwilling to rely on governments alone, Strong welcomed the support of environmental nongovernment organisations, which were willing partners. Before Rio, however, Strong saw that the business community was not engaged. To address this problem, he helped industry leaders create the Business Council for Sustainable Development.Since Rio, international environmental rules and norms have become an important element of environmental governance. The other feature is the popularity of public-private partnerships to address environmental problems. This has led to criticism that the agenda is being dominated by corporate environmentalism, based on voluntary action, deregulation, free markets and trade.

Illustrating paradigm shifts relevant to economic governance and cities, this chapter begins with the moral order which dominated Europe until the mid-17th century, continues with the rational paradigm of political systems to promote progress in the 18th and 19th centuries, and concludes with the paradigm of efficiency and prosperity which came in at the turn of the 20th century and became consolidated during and after World War One. Space-time co-ordination of global networks, and electrification, marked the limits to the laissez-faire model which had not been able to eliminate slums or reduce the scale of poverty. Each paradigm was organized around a different set of fears and hopes. Why should we believe that the 20th century paradigm of prosperity – which worked well enough in the post-1945 era – can guide the development of cities in a more inter-dependent world where the rate of environmental, spatial change appears to be accelerating?

Chapter one links the decline of patriarchal legitimacy over the course of the 20th century to welfare state expansion. It highlights that chapter one shows that the renaissance of the ‘welfare modelling business’, was in a large part, driven by the growth of gender and feminist analysis in welfare state debates. Chapter one also shows that Nordic feminism historically promoted critical thinking about men’s social-citizenship roles as fathers.

Reverend Leon Sullivan created one of the first global programmes that encouraged transnational firms to accept that they had social responsibilities beyond just making profits. Harnessing public opinion, he convinced leading companies operating in South Africa to desegregate their workplaces and challenge apartheid. This campaign set a model of others, who believed that firms have a responsibility to not only ‘do not harm,’ but to contribute to making ‘the world a better place.’Since the 1980s, the number of global corporate social responsibility programmes (CSR) has grown, although many have fallen short of their commitments and disappointed the expectations of the public. Nevertheless, the codes and standards associated with CSR programmes have created a body of non-legal norms, which have become an important feature of global governance.

At the start of the twenty-first century, globalisation faces serious challenges.Since 9/11, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush, US unilateralism has undermined the rule of law, as the US withdrew or undermined a number of international treaties. The Bush Administration also blocked reform of the IMF and World Bank, preventing emerging powers like China to play a more prominent role in global governance. And finally, the universality embedded in the World Trade Organization is being challenged by major regional trade agreements.As a result, the global architecture is fraying with the rise of nationalism and regional blocs. Moreover, the public is losing confidence in globalisation as governments fail to strengthen the global financial system in the wake of the 2007/8 credit crunch, and cannot agree to a strong treaty to counter climate change.

The ultimate test of how well prepared a society is to cope with and recover from a crisis is another crisis. The lessons of the economic crisis of 2008 show how long it takes to bring about reforms, and how difficult international co-operation to achieve greater coherence can be. Looking to the future, disasters – global and local – are likely to exceed past trends, challenging the capacity of individual countries to absorb their impact. Cross-border, cross-sectoral, place-based strategies will be difficult for governments to introduce and implement, as illustrated by examples from the past two decades, and by the risks associated with flooding. Earlier in the 20th century, modern networked infrastructure utilities were seen as a point of vulnerability, but bombing in war did not bring about an expected collapse of urban societies and economies. Instead, this experience highlighted the factors of resilience. Strengthening resilience makes sense but it is not a cost-free strategy. The greatest risk to resilience comes from the fragmentation of society and a loss of social capital.

There has been a fundamental shift in urban economies as manufacturing has declined: the service sector, including culture, generates trade for cities but is difficult to measure according to the traditional “basic/non-basic” model. In the knowledge economy, firms want to locate where the people they employ want to live. This puts more emphasis on the specific, immovable assets of places. Livable cities put more emphasis on the quality of life; they do not compete for investment and jobs in the same way as competitive cities. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games which call attention to the tension between competitiveness and livability also highlight the need for long-term strategies and for delivery on legacy promises. In both kinds of cities, the waterfront and the coastal zone are the next strategic frontier, posing many seemingly insoluble problems around conflicts over land use and amenity values. Resolving these issues is the challenge of strategic planning.

George Ball became the principal spokesperson for a group of fellow businesspeople who were strong supporters of globalisation. Like Ball, they saw globalisation faltering in the late-1960s, with few friends among the political elite. Referred to by the New York Times as the ‘New Globalists,’ they decided that they needed to take a direct role in promoting globalisation. Otherwise, they feared that postwar order might falter.Ball argued that global markets needed to be freed from the ‘ceaseless interference from its puzzled parent, the sovereign state,’ and so the New Globalists worked to promote the sovereignty of the markets as the foundation of globalisation.Deciding that the New Globalists needed a formal platforms to promote their ideas, David Rockefeller created the Trilateral Commission, and Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum. These business clubs successfully co-opted members of the political elite, and together they have formed an engine room for policies, partnerships and programmes to extend the boundaries of market-led globalisation.

The global economic order that emerged at the end of the Second World War was the work of two men: John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. This chapter describes the tense negotiations between them. Once they had agreed on a final package, however, they worked closely. At an international conference held in Bretton Woods, they convince delegates to create the IMF and World Bank.The ‘third leg’ of the Bretton Woods stool was to be the International Trade Organization (ITO). Negotiations between the main sponsors of the ITO ran into problems early. Will Clayton for the US and Sir Stafford Cripps for the UK, failed to come to an agreement before the Havana Conference, in which the ITO treaty was negotiated. When the resultant ITO charter failed to be ratified, the major trading powers agreed to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which saw limited liberalisation of trade.These institutions are the fundamental building blocks of the liberal economic order, designed to ‘make finance the servant, not the master of human desires.’

President Roosevelt called Leo Pasvolsky the ‘architect of the United Nations.’ However, he received this accolade through luck, as his main rival, Sumner Welles, was politically assassinated in a rather sordid affair before he could take credit for his contributions to the final design.The machinations in San Francisco, where the UN treaty was negotiated, are described. There was a rebellion, led by Australia, against granting the major powers veto and the conference would have unravelled had it not been for some backroom arm-twisting by the US. As a result, the final architecture sacrificed true equality between nation members to accommodate the demands of the major powers.When the Cold War broke out, this flaw in the UN’s structure made it difficult for the organisation to resolve ongoing tensions between the major power blocs and keep the peace.

When Gro Brundtland was elected Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), she soon discovered that she headed an organisation that had lost its way.To revive its fortunes, Brundtland aggressively partnered with pharmaceutical companies to allow WHO to expand its health programmes, including achieving the Millennium Development Goals that address health.Brundtland’s success was largely due to her ability to quantify the economic costs of poor health, particularly in developing countries. This helped her to secure increased public and private funds to tackle problems like malaria and HIV/AIDS.Brundtland also launched a code to limit marketing of tobacco products to minors. Setting a new way to govern the global domain, this code allowed WHO to show that globalisation could be a force for good, by promulgating global norms to deal with a major health problem.

As the US entered the war, former presidential candidate and dedicated internationalist, Wendell Willkie worried that Americans were not looking ahead to when the war would be won. Having seen the opportunity squandered after the First World War, he set out to convince the public of the necessity of a strong international order to underwrite postwar security and prosperity. Through his book One World and his media appearances, Willkie campaigned against US isolationism and helped popularise liberal internationalism, both inside the US and elsewhere. His successes helped pave the way for the creation of the United Nations, World Bank, IMF and GATT, making Willkie an important pioneer in the history of globalisation.