The concept of ‘governance’ denotes not formal institutions but informal forms of social control and loose and fungible structures of power. Interest group theory, public policy analysis, bargaining approaches, pluralism and neopluralism, elite theory, capture theory, and the like suggest that such processes are at the heart of policy-making and implementation. Global governance institutions are not the structurally differentiated, relatively autonomous, multifunctional institutions represented in modern state theory, indeed, they are moving in the opposite direction through the ‘fragmentation of global governance architectures’, ‘forum shopping’, and the hybridization of public and private. Globalizing special interests enmeshed with transgovernmental networks increasingly determine outcomes. Global economic growth, environmental policy-making, new wars, and uneven development involve complex dialectics of bottom up/top down, inside/out, endogenous and exogenous variables, not a coherent institutional shift to global governance.