The idea of ‘global governance’ is now firmly established in political sci­ence and practice.

Most generally, it entails that policies affecting people around the globe should be supported by a plethora of actors to ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. Yet how are these ideas made relatable to a public, particularly a global one? This chapter traces the mythical nar­ratives that sustain global governance.

Policies (and politics) are in need of legitimation and explaining, and the political actions taken and goals envisioned for the future must be made compatible with the ‘collective desire’ (Nonhoff 2006, 148). For abstract ideas to be persuasive not just once but persistently, they need to be woven into an appealing story that binds the various elements to signal coherence, reconciling conflicting elements in a unified narrative (Glynos

and Howarth 2007, 147). Even more, the story should be narrated in a way that is compelling and thus desirable to accept (Laclau 1990). We argue that the political myth of civil society participation (CSP) serves to render global governance appealing. Through a narrative analysis, we show how and why the idea of global governance has become so pervasive, both as a political and an academic paradigm.

Classically, global governance is defined as a heuristic concept embrac­ing all sorts of transnational policymaking ‘from the family to the interna­tional organization’ (Rosenau 1995, 13). The concept has been nurtured by functionalist and normative ideals of world government, or at least wide-ranging regulatory spaces—taking on varied forms and procedures in line with different ideologies—and remains thus a subject of discussion and disagreement. While it was first mainly discussed in the context of policy formulation in areas of ‘low politics’, today global governance is a broad concept relating to the functioning of international institutions generally (Karns and Mingst 2009), aspects of global economic inter­dependence (Stiglitz and Kaldor 2013), or global civil society (Castells 2008).

Differentiating global from international governance, scholars have highlighted ‘the increased involvement of non-state actors in norm- and rule-setting processes and compliance monitoring’ (Bruhl and Rittberger 2001, 2). Therefore, we posit here that CSP is needed as a normative and functionalist core of global governance. As political myth, it estab­lishes the idea that groups representing civil society emerge beyond the nation-state which are essential for the functioning of global governance. We thus understand CSP in global governance as a myth in the sense of a narrative that is established, formulated, and repeated by policymakers and academics and that legitimises and naturalises political practices. This myth-function is important. Similar to (democratic) governmental poli­tics, governance strongly depends on the acceptance by a majority of those it affects (Rosenau and Czempiel 1992, 4).

To analyse the content and functioning of the myth, we first specify what ‘myth’ means in our understanding and introduce narration analysis as a tool to analyse the operation of myths in political contexts. We then present the results of our narrative analysis of core policy documents and academic-political reports on global governance. We discuss the ways in which the narrative of CSP in global governance works as a myth and show its political functions. Drawing on examples from the World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 and 2005, we finally focus on the effects of this particular mythical narrative by showing how it continues to legitimise and naturalise global governance.