With the advent of globalisation, national legislation and regulation as well as legal practice have become less and less effective. The concept of 'global governance' stands for increasing efforts to harmonise law internationally and to replace the traditionally slow and frequently ineffective means of harmonisation by treaty with new methods of international standard-setting, e.g. soft law and mutual evaluation processes. In these endeavours, global governance also implies ways of sharing responsibility between the public sector (regulation and supervision), the private sector (self-regulation), and civil society (democratic oversight).

In the wake of this development, the Basel Institute on Governance has accumulated a unique level of expertise in developing and accompanying international processes that are based on democratic legitimation and mutual enforcement. At the same time, and reacting to the acute need for academic reflection on such newly evolving processes, the Institute is actively fostering international cross-stakeholder policy dialogue on these issues. A series of sectorial international conferences have addressed the governance challenges in global health systems and in the pharmaceutical industry, for instance (in May 2005) a conference on 'Self-regulation in the pharmaceutical industry: What can it achieve?', its follow up conference (in September 2006) on 'Access to essential medication', and finally (in April 2008) a conference on 'Philanthropy in Global Health - Governance and Effectiveness Criteria'.

A further stream of research in the area of global governance in which the Institute is engaged considers the role of nonstate actors in contemporary standard setting. To gather insights into this debate from various disciplines, and to foster the interdisciplinary discussion as well as that between academics and practitioners concerned with the topic, the Institute organised an international conference in February 2007.