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I have just finished, in collaboration with five other authors, a Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) Discussion Paper Series on "Global Order and the New Regionalism." The series looks at the relationships between global and regional institutions and how the new regionalism can be either a benefit or a challenge to governance institutions at the global level.

In addition, I study the changing role of emerging economies and their attitudes towards global governance, with a particular focus on the largest emerging economies, China, India, Brazil.

And finally, I work on something I call complex governance: new, more hybrid forms of global governance that involve non-state actors but sometimes intergovernmental organisations and national governments as well. I try to find out how and why these new forms of governance are emerging and why they are particularly prevalent in certain issue areas, such as climate change and global health.

Where do you see the most exciting debates happening in the field right now?

Drawing on my own projects, a crucial question is what impact the emerging economies will have on current structures of global governance. Are they really deeply challenging these structures, are they pursuing moderate reform, or are they essentially accepting existing structures and being co-opted into them? And how are they behaving across issue areas in that regard? Scholars have taken different views on this issue; some see the emerging economies as real challengers to the status quo while others, including myself, think they are actually quite conservative in certain respects.

There are also a lot of interesting debates around what I call complex governance: Is it legitimate, is it effective, is it more effective than traditional formal intergovernmental organisations like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank? How can these hybrid forms of governance be made more effective and how can they work in tandem with more formal and legal forms of global governance?

Finally, there is a larger debate in the public policy domain about what kind of agenda global governance can and should aspire to and whether newer issue areas, such as migration, cyber and global health, should be brought more formally into global governance. Currently, these issue areas are not necessarily ungoverned spaces, but there are only few formal structures governing them outside of national regulatory structures. So the question is: Can and should there be more global governance in these issue areas? And, of course, another question is whether politically that is going to happen.

Going forward what is the biggest challenge for global governance research? What are we currently missing?

I think we need to know much more about these new forms of complex governance. It is important that we look at the landscape of global governance in its entirety rather than focusing only on formal intergovernmental organisations. We know that new governance structures are emerging and that they are important but we do not have good data about them. At the same time, collecting this kind of data is very difficult because there are so many new governance structures and we do not always understand how they work. So collecting data will require a very granular understanding of complex governance.

We also need to learn more about how effective these new governance structures are: There is a lot of activity but we do not know if it matters and what difference it ultimately makes. Again, this is a very challenging endeavour: Even in the case of formal organisations, measuring effectiveness is hard, so for informal organisations it is even harder.

Despite these challenges I think research on this frontier is important and really interesting. There is a lot of "dark matter" in global governance, a lot of things are going on and we do not really know much about them. We need to get a better handle on these new forms of governance, how effective they are and whether they are substituting or complementing formal governance structures.

This interview was conducted by Kateřina Tolarová (MSc Global Governance and Ethics) at the inaugural Global Governance International Network Meeting hosted by the Global Governance Institute in November 2016.