The politics of hybridity in global crisis governance CGLG event with Prof. Christian Kreuder-Sonnen (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

At this Centre of Global Governance (CGLG) event, we welcome Prof. Christian Kreuder-Sonnen (Friedrich Schiller University Jena) and discuss his article on “the politics of hybridity in global crisis governance” (with Dr. Juanita Uribe, Geneva Graduate Institute). The article argues that the growing entanglement of public and private actors in responses to transnational crises is less a functional adaptation to complexity than a deliberate reconfiguration of global power and authority. Hybrid arrangements elevate private actors as co-governors and subordinate public goals to commercial logics under the banner of urgent collective action. Bringing together debates on crisis governance and hybrid global governance (e.g. public-private and multistakeholder partnerships) the article foregrounds the distinctive political work crises perform in enabling and normalizing these institutional forms. Shifting attention from effectiveness to questions of authority, accountability, and definition of the public good, it highlights the distributive politics embedded in crisis-induced hybridity. These dynamics are illustrated through two cases: the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative that emerged after the 2008 food crisis, and the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), particularly COVAX, during the COVID-19 pandemic.