It is now axiomatic to say that global governance has evolved beyond the conventional “cascade model” in which national governments adopt international agreements and implement them domestically through national legislation and policies. Yet, little is known about how new forms of global governance structure and exercise authority; how national and local systems intersect with and push against these global structures; how power is distributed and exercised across the local, national, and international levels; and how these global governance systems change. Grassroots Global Governance answers these questions by analyzing one alternative form of global governance that arises around local-cumulative problems like deforestation, watershed degradation, and climate change.

With this in mind, I would like to address several comments made in Prakash Kashwan’s generous review, for which I am grateful. Kashwan correctly notes that “engagement with state actors” is “pivotal to the success of grassroots global governance.” He then asserts that this warrants revisiting “the notion that grassroots global governance is a substitute for state failures.” I disagree. First, grassroots global governance is a substitute for the conventional model of global governance, not any and all activities by state actors. The review presents a false dichotomy where either national governments address a global problem by implementing international agreements and/or national laws, or politicians and government bureaucrats do not matter at all. By contrast, the book presents a theory of networked governance that explains how government and non-governmental actors at various levels of analysis can work outside the formal national policy process to affect change on the ground, and how these changes reverberate back to the international level. The Ecuadorian cases show that even when politicians and bureaucrats block the national policy process, governance networks can still get stuff done by shifting contestation to other arenas, including local social and policy arenas. The issue is not whether state actors matter, but what governance processes (formal and informal) they participate in.

Second, I do not assert that “contestation is invariably resolved through clever framing and organizational strategies of network activation.” The book’s failed cases show otherwise. Indeed, the book argues that contestation is never fully resolved, but is an ongoing process (pp. 22–23). This is why “success” is measured by whether the grassroots global governance process endures through each of its three phases, and why the process is graphically depicted as cyclical. Network activation strategies determine the outcome of contestation (e.g., the balance of power between different stakeholder groups and the way these groups perceive their interests and the issue at hand) at any given time. Given this, it should be clear that grassroots global governance is not necessarily a progressive project. I am not making a normative argument about whether grassroots global governance is “good” or who it is good for, but rather presenting an empirically based argument about how global governance works outside the conventional framework.

Third, contestation does have distributional consequences. This is why the book’s theory highlights the importance of “pressure from beside” during Phase 2 of grassroots global governance (local experimentation with innovative governance arrangements). Pressure from “beside” (not described in the review) entails simultaneous, balanced, mutually enforcing and reciprocal pressures among all key stakeholder groups. The review mentions the pressure exerted by municipal government representatives on landowners and water users, but neglects the simultaneous and equally important pressures exerted by landowners on local government and water users, and by water users on local government and landowners. All of these “pressures from beside” must be flowing simultaneously for Phase 2 of the process to endure. When pressure only flows in one direction, the process breaks down.

Finally, it is worth highlighting that in Phase 3 of grassroots global governance contestation shifts again to national and international policy arenas as networks seek to scale up innovative local governance experiments. Just as grassroots actors contribute to the evolution of global ideas by engaging in bricolage during Phase 2, national and international actors similarly engage in bricolage during Phase 3, spurring further evolution of global ideas. This is why the concept buen vivir is treated differently in international discussions of sustainable development than in many Ecuadorian communities. Nevertheless, local experimentation and bottom-up network activation around buen vivir helped produce a 2030 sustainable development agenda rooted in the idea of living in “harmony with nature” that is different from the sustainable development of the 1990s. Both buen vivir and sustainable development remain contested concepts, and they are still evolving. Grassroots Global Governance explains how and why this evolution occurs.