The radical transformation of the system of global economic governance has become increasingly urgent. Events in the last half of the 20th century and at the turn of the millennium have underlined the fact that both the structure and the key institutions of the current international system are deeply dysfunctional. The Asian financial crisis, the unraveling of the World Trade Organizational ministerial meetings in Seattle and Cancun, the stock market meltdown in 2001-2002, the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2002 - these are among the milestones in the crisis of legitimacy that now pervades the system and its key actors.

The current system is built on and shores up the paradigm of neoliberalism, which became dominant after 1980. Nothing could be a more damning indictment of the neoliberal model than global social conditions a quarter of a century later. After 25 years of structural adjustment and other radical pro-market policies in developing countries, there are more poor people in the world today than in 1985. There is much more inequality both within and among countries. The areas of the world that adopted pro-market policies most wholeheartedly - Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe - saw their numbers of poor people increase significantly. Indeed, massively in the case of the former poster boy of neoliberalism, Argentina, where 53% of the population tumbled below the poverty line, with 25% defined "indigent", following the economic collapse of 2002.

So deep is the crisis of neoliberal institutions that even sectors of the global elite that have benefited from them say they are in need of fundamental reform. The Meltzer Commission, which was set up by the US Congress to look at the performance of the international financial institutions, proposed a radical transformation of the World Bank, eliminating its lending operations and parceling out its main functions to regional development banks. George Shultz, former US Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon, demanded the abolition of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for encouraging moral hazard.

Among established figures who have weighed in for reform in the last five years are economist Jeffrey Sachs, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, and financier George Soros.

The common characteristic of all these figures is that their advocacy for reform has come from a desire to save or improve the current system of global capitalism. Even Shultz's proposal to scrap the IMF comes from a perspective of freeing market forces from distortions introduced by government bailouts of irresponsible lenders. Freeing the market from bureaucratic interference is also what informs the recommendations of the Meltzer Commission.

The contributions to the International Regulations Workshop's e-forum on international regulations come from a radically different perspective: how to protect people from the ravages of a global market driven by corporate profitability. The "disembedding" of the market from its social matrix, to use the language of the great Hungarian scholar Karl Polanyi, is, in the view of the authors of the contributions, the central cause of the inter-linked crises of our time. And the key problem with which each of the authors grapples is how the market and its key agents - the corporations, the multilateral institutions, and hegemonic governments - can be resubordinated to society. The proposals for change, then, that come from these contributions cannot help but challenge the fundamental dynamics of the global capitalist system.

Download the synthesis of the e-forum