Professor Dr Alexandra Kaasch is Junior Professor in Transnational Social Policy at the University of Bielefeld. Her research interests include global social policy, health policy, and international organisations. She has published both in comparative and global social policy. Among her recent publications are a guest-edited special issue for the journal Global Social Policy (13.1), and a co-edited volume with Paul Stubbs, Transformations in Global and Regional Social Policies (2014). She is editor of the Global Social Policy Digest.


Professor Dr Kerstin Martens is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include theories of international relations, international organizations, global governance, and global public policy, in particular education and social policy. She heads the research project on 'Internationalization of Education Policy' located at the University of Bremen. She is co-editor of several books, amongst other Internationalization of Education Policy? (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and Education in Political Science: Discovering a Neglected Field (London & New York: Routledge 2009). She holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

This volume provides a coherent and comprehensive account of the diverse actors and agencies involved in global social governance and seeks to advance our understanding of the global dimension of social policy.

Actors and Agency in Global Social Governance seeks to advance our understanding of the global dimension of social policy by applying the notion of global social governance on actors, their relations to each other, and their pathways as well as their footprints of influence in the specific policy fields of social concern in which they are active.

Focusing on a broad array of individual and corporate global social policy actors, ranging from internationally operating intergovernmental organizations to state formations and NGOs, the contributions to this volume draw a fuller picture of agency in global social policy than what current accounts provide. It considers the multiple facets of individual scope and legitimacy for a particular actor in conjunction with the configuration of global social governance as characterised by multi-centred and multi-scaled obstacles as well as diverse forms of collaboration.

The volume studies the contextualised actor's range and power in designing, shaping, and facilitating various global social policies. Thus, the contributions discuss the role of particular (corporate) actors within global social policy structures and assess the impact of a number of key organizations, states, groups, and individuals in the governance of global social policy. At the same time, a variety of social policy fields in which these actors are involved are addressed, including labour market issues, family policy, health policy, education policy, migration issues, and global (re)distribution via various forms of development aid or remittances.