Over the last few decades, the Westphalian nation-state has lost its hegemonic position in the system of geo-governance. A dispersive revolution has led to the emergence of powerful newly networked business organizations, new subsidiary-focused governments, and increasingly virtual, elective, and malleable communities. This in turn has led to the crystallization of distributed governance regimes, based on a wider variety of more fluid and always evolving groups of stakeholders.

In The New Geo-Governance, Gilles Paquet develops a general conceptual framework to deal with the new evolving reality of global governance. He uses this framework to critically examine the evolving territorial governance (hemispheric governance, meso-innovation systems, smart city-regions) and tackles the more complex governance challenges raised by sustainability and common-property resources like oceans. Paquet further explores the implications of this emerging polycentric geo-governance on the new forms of stewardship and its impact on citizenship, federalism, and other technologies of coordination, and reflects on the sort of subversive bricolage required if the missing mechanisms for effective coordination are to be put in place.

The New Geo-Governance will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in governance, organizational design, international affairs, and political studies.

Gilles Paquet (1936–2019), O.C., MRSC, was Professor Emeritus at the Telfer School of Management and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Society of Arts of London, and served as President of the Royal Society of Canada (2003–2005). He studied at Laval, Queen's (Canada) and at the University of California (Los Angeles) where he was Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics. He taught at Carleton University for almost 20 years before joining the University of Ottawa in 1981. He received honorary doctorates from Queen's, Laval, and Thompson Rivers University, received the Public Service Citation Award of APEX, and was made Honorary Member of l'Association des économistes québécois. He was made Member of the Order of Canada in 1992.

Gilles Paquet's profile page