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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 6/1/2021, SPi
TATIANA CARAYANNIS
and
THOMAS G. WEISS
1
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3
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the World? Addressing “Problems without Passports” (2014); Global Governance: Why?
What? Whither? (2013); Humanitarian Business (2013); and Thinking about Global
Governance: People and Ideas Matter (2011). He is also most recently the editor of
Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development (2021, with Stephen Browne), the
second edition of The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (2018, with Sam Daws),
and the second edition of International Organization and Global Governance (2018,
with Rorden Wilkinson).
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Figures
1.1 Interactions among the Three United Nations 20
1.2 Historical overview of the number of IGOs and INGOs, 1909–2017 31
1.3 Parent TNCs and foreign affiliates, World Investment Report 1992–2009 32
Tables
2.1 Number and ratio of INGOs and IGOs founded by decade, 1900–2019 42
4.1 Number of think tanks by region, 2018 104
Box
4.1 The functions of knowledge brokers 107
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List of Abbreviations
xx
Introduction
The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss,
Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0001
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 28/12/2020, SPi
2 “ ”
3
4 “ ”
state sovereignty is back with a vengeance. At the same time, it is not what it
used to be. Analyses of world politics acknowledge the extent to which the
stage is crowded with a variety of actors, which is why “global governance”
emerged in the late twentieth century as the term of art to conceptualize the
UN, other IGOs, multilateral cooperation, and public-private partnerships.⁸
This realization is fundamental for those who concentrate on only two
United Nations, the one composed of member states and the second one
of secretariats with international civil servants—recruited on the basis of
their nationality—who work for the states that determine agendas and
(sometimes) pay the bills. We have long pointed to another UN, which is
composed of non-state actors closely associated with the organization and its
activities but not formally part of it. Despite the growth in analyses attempt-
ing to understand the relationships between non-state actors and IGOs,
this “other” or “Third” UN is poorly understood, often ignored, and nor-
mally discounted.
The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization whose 193 mem-
bers are states. UN analysts are typically students of IR, IL, IO, and IPE. They
begin with the building block of the Peace of Westphalia that essentially ended
European religious wars in 1648. They also have long accepted that the world
is divided into territorial states. Prior to Westphalia, dynastic empires, city-
states, feudalistic orders, clans and tribes, churches, and a variety of other
public authorities organized people into groupings for identity and problem-
solving. The territorial state emerged as the basic unit of social organization
from about the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth
century, first in Europe and then elsewhere. It commanded primary loyalty
and was responsible for order, and eventually for justice and prosperity within
a state’s territorial boundaries. European rulers found the institution of the
state useful and perpetuated its image; ironically, politically aware persons
outside the West adopted the notion to resist domination by those same
colonial powers. With decolonization, the number of states has grown, as
has the rigidity of the attachment to sacrosanct sovereignty by young and old
states alike.
Despite the persistence of clan, ethnic, and religious identities and a pattern
of inconsistencies that Stephen Krasner famously called “organized hypoc-
risy,”⁹ most of those exercising power have promoted the perception that the
basic political-legal unit of world politics was and should remain the territorial
state. The basis for sovereignty is an administrative apparatus with a supposed
monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a specific geographical area with
a stable population.
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5
That the only bona fide UN members are territorial states (with the exception
of the Vatican) is the point of departure for an analytical puzzle about what
constitutes the United Nations. Some examples should help the reader under-
stand why we came up with the analytical tool of the Third UN. Numerous
non-territorial players in issue-specific global governance are more influential
than many territorial states: the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) for the laws of war and humanitarian principles; the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (or FIFA, its familiar abbreviation)
for the world’s most popular sport (football or soccer); and the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (also better known by its
acronym, ICANN) for the internet. Similarly, corporations have come
together to participate in the development of governance systems either at
the urging of international organizations, such as the UN’s Global Compact, or
in shared recognition of the need for new systems of coordination, such
as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
(SWIFT). Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Group
render judgments that are authoritative enough to cause market responses.
Individual experts serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) or eminent persons on other panels and commissions have altered
narratives and public policy. The global significance of non-traditional actors
like Facebook and the need for new governance systems for digital space was
explicit in UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ 2018 appointment of a
High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.
It is hard to imagine contemporary world politics without non-state
actors—indeed, their activities and influence on politics and the world econ-
omy often dwarf those of many small countries. That said, geo-political power
is reflected in the UN’s state-based, institutional structures, ranging from the
veto-wielding permanent five members of the Security Council (P-5) to the
leverage of the largest contributors to the budget. As we see, the history of
the Third UN resembles that of the First UN and the Second UN in lacking
diversity—that is, it is more white, male, and elitist than the globe’s popula-
tion, or even the vast bulk of member states.
The Third UN’s roles include research, policy analysis, idea mongering,
advocacy, and public education. Its various components put forward new
information and ideas, push for alternative policies, and mobilize public
opinion around UN deliberations and projects. They also can impede pro-
gress, by deploying the same methods; the polarization that afflicts geo-
political dynamics and left-right, secular-religious societal battles are also
reflected across the Third UN’s ever-changing network of networks that
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helps the UN “think.” Some Third UN actors advocate for particular ideas,
while others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation.
Participation varies with issues and geographic focus as well as timing.
At any given time, any of these non-state actors can be a member of the
Third UN. There are no barriers to entry or exit, and no permanent
membership.
Some critics might regard our perspectives as rather orthodox and as
extensions of the status quo.¹⁰ However, many non-state actors such as
informed scholars, practitioners, and activists have had a distinct value-
added within intergovernmental contexts to push out intellectual and policy
envelopes, to venture beyond what passes for conventional wisdom. These
actors of the Third UN are independent of but provide essential inputs
into Claude’s other two United Nations. They do not necessarily foster
progressive values and actions—the National Rifle Association and many
transnational corporations (TNCs), for instance, pursue agendas that
may distort the pursuit of the UN’s human rights or environmental norms.
What is impossible to ignore, however, is that such “outside-insiders” or
“inside-outsiders” are integral, today and tomorrow, to the world body.
What once may have seemed marginal is now central for world politics and
multilateralism.
In addition, the relationships often are more complicated than they appear.
Michael Doyle, who was a professor at Princeton and Columbia Universities
before joining the UN Secretariat in New York and rejoined the academy after
leaving, agreed: “If you want genuinely fresh ideas, you’ve got to go outside the
system altogether. You have to go to commissions, panels, academics and
NGOs, and a few governments—mostly academics and NGOs.” Just Faaland,
who spent most of his career at the Norwegian development institute in
Bergen but often interacted with the UN system, also emphasized the rele-
vance of injecting outside intellectual grist: “The UN would be a much poorer
organization if it hadn’t been for . . . consultancies and other ways of mobiliz-
ing the outside world.”¹¹
Social scientists are taught to ask, “So what?” The following pages demon-
strate four ways that ideas and norms make a difference:
7
We say more about such impacts in subsequent chapters, but the dynamics of
change invariably involve the creation, refinement, and implementation of
ideas—for good and for evil. Any explanations of continuity and change also
entail technology, politics, and economics; but at a minimum, ideas matter in
opening space for experimentation and modification.
Hence, the complexity of the planet and the analytical requirement to
accurately reflect the UN go hand-in-hand. A heterogeneous and numerous
array of actors participates in processes that produce knowledge and norms. In
addition, a prescriptive agenda looms. Besides reinforcing the overarching
argument that the UN is more than the sum of its member-state and secre-
tariat parts, we are committed to taking advantage of as diverse (in terms of
geographic origins and substantive backgrounds) a range of sources as possible
for alternative knowledge and norms, for non-traditional or non-mainstream
thinking.
To simplify, ideas and operations are the two main activities by the First UN
and the Second UN; the Third UN has a discernable impact on their thinking
and activities. Although operations account for the bulk of actual expenditures
and are important for testing ideas and policies, we focus on how non-state
actors help the UN think. Those that receive our attention are NGOs, eminent
individuals, think tanks, university researchers, and the for-profit sector. They
are essential and underappreciated sources of knowledge and norms produced
by the UN—in the past and at present, as they will be in the future.
We remind readers that there is also a Third International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and an equivalent network in other IGOs. Theoretical and analytical
tool kits must reflect this reality; we hope that our attempts to better under-
stand the Third UN will inspire others to do the same for other multilateral
organizations.
It should be obvious that we need to conceptualize the UN, other IGOs, and
multilateral cooperation more comprehensively than had been the case until
late in the twentieth century. That happened in the 1990s within the academy
and policy circles.
The term “global governance” was born from a marriage—neither shotgun
nor arranged but precipitated by a blend of real-world events accompanied by
developments in scholarly and policy circles—between academic theory and
practical policy-formulation. At the outset of the twentieth century’s final
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9
Public-private partnerships are not new to the UN. In fact, most UN entities
maintain some kind of public-private partnership program. As non-state-led
governance has grown exponentially in some sectors, e.g. the environment, so
has the academic literature about these public authorities. In discussing
environmental governance, Liliana B. Andonova defines these partnerships
as “agreements for collaborative governance between public actors (national
governmental agencies, sub-national governments, or IOs) and nonstate act-
ors (foundations, firms, advocacy organizations, or others), which establish
common norms, rules, objectives, and decision-making and implementation
procedures for a set of policy problems.”²⁰ Anne Marie Goetz writes that
“[f]Feminist engagement with international institutions is . . . a paradigmatic
example of how a relatively power-deprived social group (women and femin-
ists)” by building partnerships with states willing to champion gender equality,
can “challenge the power of sovereign states.”²¹
The emergence of the term—and changes in the way that the purpose of
insights from it were expressed—imbued global governance with the aspir-
ations that had motivated earlier generations of IR, IL, IO, and IPE scholars.
Global governance came to refer to collective efforts to identify, understand,
and address worldwide problems and processes that went beyond the capaci-
ties of individual states. It included both formal and informal values, rules,
norms, practices, and organizations that provided additional order beyond
purely formal regulations and structures. It reflected a longing for the inter-
national system to provide government-like services—in this case, global
public goods—in the absence of anything like a world government.
Global governance thus encompasses a wide variety of cooperative problem-
solving arrangements that are visible but informal (e.g., practices or guidelines)
or are temporary formations (e.g., coalitions of the willing). Such arrangements
could also be more formal, taking the shape of hard rules (laws and treaties) or
institutions with administrative structures and established practices to manage
collective affairs by a variety of actors—including state authorities, IGOs,
NGOs, private sector entities, and other civil society actors.²²
One of us has spent considerable intellectual efforts²³ in trying to move
beyond answering the question that Lawrence Finkelstein provocatively posed
shortly after the term emerged 25 years ago—“What is global governance?”
His answer at that moment was “virtually anything.”²⁴ The other one of us has
been tinkering with social network-based approaches to understand how an
institution built on state sovereignty can adapt to the trans-boundary issues
and actors of our globalized world.²⁵ Both of us represent two successive
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generations of the Third UN. This book seeks to put more flesh on one part of
the global governance skeleton, the United Nations. It is part history, and part
a call to action. Readers should recall that our original argument appeared in a
journal whose title, “Global Governance,” reflects the move away from the old-
fashioned notion of states and their creation in the form of IGOs as the only
meaningful pillars of world order.
Among other things, the thaw in the Cold War changed the balance between
markets and states. As a result, a number of voices—for instance, human rights
advocates, gender activists, development specialists, and groups of indigenous
peoples—were amplified in the ideational and operational spaces that earlier
had been virtually the exclusive territory of states or intergovernmental sec-
retariats. This book explores this phenomenon.
Chapter 1 begins our exploration of “The Third UN” by probing the nuts-
and-bolts of “Non-State Actors and the World Organization’s Thinking.” It
defends our selection of and concentration on the main knowledge brokers in
the Third UN. It explores the growth in numbers of the two major types of
non-state actors that are easiest to count, international NGOs and TNCs, as
well as their dynamics within the UN system. The widespread push, including
within IGOs, for evidence-based policymaking has created a further demand
for think tanks and research that “translate applied and basic research into a
language that is understandable, reliable, and accessible for policy makers.”²⁶ It
is impossible to appreciate the nature of the policy process without under-
standing the “whole” UN—First, Second, and Third.
Chapter 2, “NGOs: Sovereignty-Free Partners for UN Policy Development,”
examines the main tasks of NGOs and how they are related to the achieve-
ment of their missions and to those of the United Nations. The history of
NGO links to the Third UN—including an official role in the UN’s constitu-
tion, Charter Article 71—as well as the various distinctions between them and
other non-state actors provides an essential building block for the book.
Detailed cases concern efforts to alleviate the plague of landmines (the
International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ICBL), to improve international
judicial pursuit (the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, CICC),
and to set the agenda for sustainable development (the conversations leading
to the formulation and adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals,
or SDGs).
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12 “ ”
for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Small Arms Survey, and others have helped
shape thinking within UN Geneva. Especially over the last two decades, these
intellectual entry points—primarily based in the Global North but increasingly
with wider participation from individuals and institutions worldwide—have
helped shape the UN’s framing of international peace and security, human
rights and humanitarian action, and sustainable development.
Chapter 5 follows by detailing the growing inputs for UN deliberations from
“Alternative Voices”; the sub-title indicates the result, namely “Challengers of
the Normative Postwar Order.” There are two distinct sets of “voices” that
appear in this chapter: from within emerging powers that formerly were
absent or largely hidden; and from for-profit businesses. The first part exam-
ines the political and economic changes brought about by rising and emerging
powers. We need not exaggerate either the shadow cast by the declining West
or what Amitav Acharya calls the “hype of the rest”²⁸ to see that the role of
emerging powers in global governance is altering the landscape for how to
approach international peace and security, human rights, humanitarian
action, and sustainable development—the pillars of UN activity.
The second part of Chapter 5 reflects the arrival on the UN stage of actors
that formerly had cameo roles despite their weight in the global economy. As
mentioned, business in general and TNCs in particular were once anathema in
UN circles because of their perceived role in the Global South as exploiters of
resources and drivers of poverty. What began as an effort to bring them into
the system through the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) has bur-
geoned in the twenty-first century that has witnessed, belatedly, the mobiliza-
tion of the private business sector for numerous tasks and of the essential role
of foreign direct investment (FDI) and overseas remittances. We emphasize
technology and data firms, many of which are related to media and social
media. These long-ignored partners bring resources, expertise, new technolo-
gies, and energy to international problem-solving and to the Third UN; they
have also challenged the multilateral system and led to calls for a new
architecture of global governance.
By looking ahead to “The UN’s Normative Future,” Chapter 6 asks honestly
whether the world organization can become “Fitter for Purpose?” An essential
motivation for getting right the understanding of the Third UN is the need to
identify the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the “whole” organ-
ization. For instance, a crucial challenge is to determine how the UN should
act in the era of information disorder and public health pandemics, and thus
how a variety of knowledge producers and brokers from the Third UN can
help the UN think. There are areas where its role is accepted and well
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developed; others where there are agreements but also gaps; still others where
there is virtually no agreement or role. The task of analyzing what the UN can
and cannot do, as well as how to make it fitter-for-purpose, should have been
undertaken more vigorously earlier. However, it is even more crucial in the
Age of Trump, Brexit, Putin, Maduro, Xi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Obrador,
Bolsanaro, and Duterte. If the United Nations is not to be a relic, the rhetoric
of “[insert country] First” needs to be replaced by a more viable and robust
world body. We write at the height of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when
the breakdown of international cooperation and the pressing need for a robust
multilateral system cannot be more obvious.
It is impossible to ignore the ongoing polarization of politics in the First UN
fueled by new nationalisms and populisms worldwide. It also is a sad reality
that the Second UN is subject to a tightening grip by and pressure from the
most powerful member states. New ideas, norms, and actors are challenging
and re-shaping the United Nations. We should not overlook or minimize
them, and the Third UN is an essential contributor to these conversations.
How effective the whole UN will be in responding and managing emerging
global challenges will depend, in no small measure, on the Third UN.
If multilateralism of all stripes is under siege, the United Nations—warts
and all—remains essential.²⁹ The COVID-19 crisis revealed the limits of the
postwar system for which there are few signs of resuscitation; but at a
minimum, we must rebuild the crumbling foundations. Moreover, because
global problems require global solutions, a more ambitious redesign and
rebuilding effort is required if we are to save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war, pandemics, and climate change. “We are calling for a great
reawakening of nations,” is how Donald Trump concluded his first remarks to
the UN General Assembly in September 2017. He ignored the fact that some
three-quarters of a century earlier, the United States agreed to create the world
organization in order to curb the demonstrated horrors of nationalism run
amok; yet, he has repeatedly undermined it. Instead, he and the rest of us
should be calling for a great reawakening of the United Nations.
This book about the intellectual contribution of the non-state actors of the
Third UN is a modest contribution to that objective.
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1
The “Third” UN
Non-State Actors and the World
Organization’s Thinking
The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss,
Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0002
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 28/12/2020, SPi
“” 15
16 “”
whose director for special research, W.E.B. Du Bois, was among the leading
voices opposed to colonialism. Washington was particularly concerned
that these groups were meeting with the African delegates at the conference
to lobby for decolonization. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (better
known by its abbreviation, FBI), together with the US Army Signal Security
Agency (now the National Security Agency), monitored the interactions
among the three United Nations. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union docked an
entertainment ship in San Francisco Bay filled with vodka and caviar for its
delegates, but also with communications and listening devices for its own
espionage campaign.
In addition to these unofficial “outsiders,” the US delegation had 42 official
“outsider-insiders”—consultants officially recognized by the conference.⁷
Sponsored by Washington, they included the likes of James Shotwell, a
Columbia University historian, Virginia Gildersleeve, the long-time dean of
Barnard College and co-founder of the International Federation of University
Women, Clark Eichelberger, a peace activist and national director of the
League of Nations Association (the precursor to the UN Association), and
Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee. The consult-
ants met regularly with the US delegation, gave presentations, and offered
ideas and amendments as the draft Charter was being finalized.
In addition to successfully advocating for firmly embedding the idea of
human rights into the Charter, Schlesinger and Dorothy Robins,⁸ who
documented the role of NGOs at the San Francisco Conference, point to
at least two other instances when these outsider-insiders helped shaped the
final Charter, thereby enshrining international norms in it. The first was
their successful advocacy for the inclusion of international cooperation
around education, an idea already backed by hundreds of US university
presidents and educators in dozens of countries, but that the US delegation
initially resisted—lest it open the door to Soviet propaganda in US schools
and universities. The final UN Charter Article 13 in Chapter IV calls for the
world body to “promote international co-operation in the economic, social,
cultural, educational, and health fields.” The second example was the con-
sultants’ successful push to include a new Article 71, which enshrined in the
Charter the right for civil society to be present and consulted in UN matters.
While this hoped-for UN–NGO collaboration has often been a rocky road,
the idea of civil society’s inclusion in UN policy discussions—as relevant
today as it was in 1945—would likely not have been introduced had it not
been for the efforts of those early Third UN actors who had secured a seat at
the table.
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“” 17
Why parse this dynamic, given that networks of all types are not new?⁹
Although many governments have resisted the influence by non-state actors
in IGOs, parts of the UN system have long engaged them and drawn on
academic and policy expertise located outside the official confines of the
system. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has incorporated rep-
resentatives of trade unions and the business sector into its tripartite structure
since 1919. NGOs have been significant for advances in norms and policies at
the UN, beginning with advocacy for the inclusion of human rights in the UN
Charter in 1945 and for the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and the Genocide Convention three years later. The United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has long had close interactions with civil society
and national commissions for a wide range of children’s issues as well as for
fund-raising and advocacy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Development Fund
for Women (UNIFEM), and more recently UN Women that incorporated it,
have interacted with national committees consisting of academics and NGOs.
Indeed, it is a well-known secret: virtually all parts of the UN have drawn on
academic or professional expertise located outside the system through con-
sultants or ad hoc expert groups.
A number of authors have noted the phenomenon of non-state actors,
especially NGOs, as they intersect with the United Nations; but none has
incorporated them as an integral component of the world body itself.¹⁰
Previous analyses provide an incomplete understanding of the roles played
by members of the Third UN. First, they are viewed as “outsiders” rather than
as an essential element of an intergovernmental body. Second, their role as
purveyors of ideas and new thinking as crucial inputs to the world body has
largely been ignored. The number of non-official groups has grown dramat-
ically; meanwhile, globalization accompanied by communications and techno-
logical advances have increased the volume, reach, and impact of non-state
voices. Geographical distance and limited resources for international travel no
longer necessarily mean a lack of presence.
Adopting the notion of the Third UN is a sharper way to depict interactions
than the usual threefold vocabulary of state, market, and civil society.¹¹ The
terminology of the “Third” UN resonates well for students of IO who cut their
analytical teeth on Claude’s framework, including many of the readers of such
traditional journals as International Organization or newer ones such as
Global Governance. Finally, it better captures the networked, diverse, and
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“” 19
20 “”
First UN
(Member States)
A B
D Third UN
(Academics, Experts,
Second UN C Think Tanks, NGOs,
(Secretariats) Business, Media)
newest actors, such as Chinese and Brazilian think tanks and analysts, who
produce research that reflects alternative world views to those of what has
been, until recently, a largely western- and northern-dominated Third
UN. Our discussion of NGOs emphasizes international non-governmental
organizations, which play major roles in knowledge and norms although local
NGOs often are key counterparts in dissemination and field operations. The
point is that INGOs (including think tanks, advocacy organizations, and
operational bodies) along with scholars, eminent individuals, and the for-
profit private sector are essential yet underappreciated sources of knowledge
inputs for the development and promulgation of norms by the UN—today,
yesterday, and certainly tomorrow.
Figure 1.1 illustrates the interactions among the three United Nations. It
depicts them as separate circles whose overlapping areas convey interactive
space. We are particularly interested in where the three come together (D),
which is where the most intellectual sparks fly. Within this networked space,
individuals and private organizations interact with UN member states and
secretariats to influence or advance thinking, policies, priorities, and actions.
Juan Somavia has a well-informed vantage point—he worked in all three UNs,
including as the ILO director-general—and emphasized that for most issues
the Third UN has led, but that the First UN and the Second UN have played “a
very fundamental role as a legitimizer of ideas that are nascent, of things that
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are out there. . . . The moment the UN begins discussing an issue, and it
becomes part of programs and institutional debate, then it legitimizes some-
thing that otherwise could be perceived of as marginal in society.”¹⁹
This book pays especial attention to other key parts of this networked
space—in particular, where the Third UN and the Second UN interact (C),
because this space has been under-explored. It helps explain shifts in UN
policies, priorities, and practices—in short, the UN’s production of knowledge
and norms. “I’ve always reached out to talk to others,” Secretary-General Kofi
Annan recalled. “There is a tendency for people in this house to say, ‘We are
special. We are different. The rest of the world does not understand us.’ And
you can really get into a cocoon.” In a refreshing openness to outside inputs, he
continued: “There are times when I bring in groups to advise me on issues—
use experienced leaders to give me advice.”²⁰
We also analyze how the Third UN informs the First UN (B), both directly
as well as indirectly (via the Second UN). The reasons why come from Nafis
Sadik, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in 1987–2000:
“I think population work has always come from outside of the UN. . . . Outside
organizations put a lot more pressure on the UN, but also on governments.
I think the work of the Pop[ulation] Council, the work of many of the scholars
at Princeton University, at Stanford University influenced very much the
eventual outcome of setting up a UNFPA and having a population program.
Those influences came from outside, because in fact many members of the UN
itself in fact resisted it.”²¹
Figure 1.1 also depicts these interactions in combination with those between
the First UN and the Second UN (A). The relations between government
representatives and international civil servants have constituted the bulk of
previous UN scholarship. Those between governments and non-state actors as
well as between secretariats and non-state actors have expanded but been
inadequate. This book aims to right the balance.
22 “”
Often the ideas assume a more definite shape over time, sometimes as the
result of research, often through debate or challenge, and sometimes through
efforts to turn ideas into policy. As is to be expected, power and politics infuse
every stage.
In the quest for knowledge and norms, economist Barbara Ward reminded
us that: “Ideas are the prime movers of history. Revolutions usually begin with
ideas.”²² Victor Hugo had earlier expressed a similar sentiment: “On résiste à
l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées.”²³ Ideas lead to
action in numerous ways but almost never in a linear fashion—running from
the creation of a new idea to dissemination, from decisions by policymakers to
implementation, and on to impact and results. The non-linear process is
varied, but we reiterate the four distinct ways that ideas have an impact:
• They alter the ways that issues are perceived and the language used to
describe them.
• They redefine state and non-state interests and goals, setting agendas for
action.
• They change the ways that key groups perceive their interests and
mobilize new coalitions—thus altering the balance of forces pressing
for action or resisting it.
• They become embedded in institutions, which devote human and finan-
cial resources to carry an idea forward and thereby become a focus for
accountability and monitoring.
These four impacts provide a framework for the evidence that we marshal;
when they come together, they affect implementation at all levels, including at
the micro-level within individual countries and communities where norms
and policies affect implementation. In moving from the international to the
national level, the itinerary and speed of ideas varies depending on issues. “The
UN became the place where women could bring issues ignored at the national
level into the international spotlight to be addressed by national govern-
ments,” is the dynamic that UNIFEM’s former executive director and
ESCAP’s former executive secretary Noeleen Heyzer stressed. She pointed
out why that mattered: “When the ideas took a powerful form, they got
recognized and accepted, because it spoke about women’s lives. . . . With
these international norms, women pressured for the revisions of national
norms and policies based on international standards. We worked so hard to
ensure that decision making in the courts and in the criminal justice system
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also changed because of new legal standards and norms. So ideas became
action which changed people’s lives.”²⁴
With respect to UN ideas, elements of all four ways UN ideas have mattered
figure throughout the fifteen UN Intellectual History Project’s volumes pub-
lished by Indiana University Press between 2001 and 2010. They emphasized
economic and social development, but this book also includes examples from
international peace and security as well as human rights and humanitarian
action. Here, we repeat a concrete example that can quickly illustrate the
proposition: the formulation of statistical norms and guidelines. In
Quantifying the World, Michael Ward traced the development in the early
1950s of the System of National Accounts (SNA). It provided the guidelines
which even today enables and encourages countries around the world to
calculate their gross national product (GNP) and other core economic statis-
tics on a standardized basis. For better or worse, the SNA provides an
economic snapshot of a country’s economic performance. The system has
helped define agendas for economic policy and action in country after country,
which in turn unleashed pressures for the better use of economic resources
and, often in reaction, calls from various quarters for more attention to social
and non-economic indicators. The SNA has been embedded in the work of the
UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) and the UN Statistical Office (UNSO).
Thus, in all four of these areas, and in quite specific ways, the UN’s early work
on the SNA has had a concrete and continuous impact over the last seven
decades. It is helpful to let Ward speak for himself: “the creation of a univer-
sally acknowledged statistical system and of a general framework guiding the
collection and compilation of data according to recognized standards, both
internationally and nationally, has been one of the great and mostly unsung
successes of the UN Organization.”²⁵
We distinguish three types of ideas or beliefs—positive, normative, and
causal. Positive ideas or beliefs are those resting on hard evidence, open to
challenge, and verifiable, at least in principle. That the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance
Committee (OECD-DAC) countries spent 0.32 percent of their gross national
income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in 2016 is an
example.²⁶ Normative ideas are beliefs about what the world should look
like. That these countries ought to implement the long-standing UN target
of spending 0.7 percent of their GNI on ODA, or that there should be a more
equitable allocation of world resources or fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) are
additional examples. Causal ideas, on the other hand, are applied notions—
often about what strategy will have a particular result, or what tactics will
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24 “”
achieve a particular outcome; they are frequently hard to measure and often
with a normative element. At the UN, causal ideas regularly take an oper-
ational form—for instance, the calculation that over 0.5 percent of GNI would
be needed as ODA to support the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
was an idea that has continued for the follow-on Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). Causal ideas can be specific, but they are less than full-blown
theories.²⁷ For example, if we were to begin with the sweeping ethical prop-
osition that the world should be more just, then the idea of a more equitable
allocation of resources can be both a normative idea as well as a causal way to
improve international justice.
Research about the role of ideas falls into three categories. The first is
usually called “institutionalism.” For instance, Judith Goldstein’s and Robert
Keohane’s analyses of foreign policy²⁸ and Kathryn Sikkink’s of development
in Latin America²⁹ are concerned with how organizations shape the policy
preferences of their members. Ideas can be particularly important to policy-
making processes during periods of upheaval. In thinking about the end of
World War II, the Cold War, or post-9/11 and post-COVID-19 challenges, for
example, ideas provide conceptual road maps to understand changing prefer-
ences and definitions of the vital interests of state and non-state actors alike.
Such an approach helps us to situate the dynamics at work among ideas,
multilateral institutions, and national policies. It also enables us to begin
generalizing about how the three UNs influence elite and popular images, as
well as how opinion-makers affect the world organization.
The second research category relates to the approaches and interactions of
various groups, including Peter Haas’s epistemic communities,³⁰ Peter Hall’s
analyses of the impact of Keynesian economists,³¹ and Ernst B. Haas’s work on
knowledge and power³² as well as work by Sikkink and others on transnational
networks of activists.³³ These approaches examine the role of intellectuals in
creating ideas, of technical experts in diffusing them and making them more
concrete and scientifically grounded, and of all sorts of people in influencing
the positions adopted by a wide range of actors. The relevance of policy
decisions and action by government is an especially pertinent indicator of
impact—for which the influence of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) is a powerful ongoing illustration.
Networks of experts influence a broad spectrum of world politics through
their ability to interact with policymakers regardless of location and national
boundaries; this reality has become more obvious with an accelerating number
of technological advances—data collected in South Africa, Singapore, or
Sweden are instantaneously available to researchers with an internet
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26 “”
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28 “”
human rights and noted the reasons why the movement among the three UNs
is important for the development of norms and policies: “The most direct
carrier, obviously, is people. . . . You bring with you ideas, and there is a
contagion effect among the people you’re working with.”⁴⁵
In terms of the politics of knowledge and norms, member states make
policies, sign treaties, deploy soldiers to halt murder or keep the peace,
establish priorities and budgets, and pay the bills (or are supposed to). Ideas
can emanate from visionary individuals within the first UN. Examples include
Canadian foreign minister Lester B. Pearson’s call for the first peacekeeping
effort in 1956 and the Swedish government’s decision to organize the first
global conference on the human environment in 1972.
Influential ideas sometimes gravitate from the Second UN as well. An
intriguing example is the notion of declining terms of trade, a thesis formu-
lated by Hans Singer in 1950 at UN headquarters in the Department of
Economic Affairs and further developed and applied by Raúl Prebisch at the
UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA).⁴⁶ At the time, the two
intellectual stalwarts were highly influential members of the Second UN, who
had assembled the initial data and argument outside of secretariats. They then
publicized the problems created by the tendency of the terms of trade to move
against primary commodities, thus creating persistent balance-of-payments
problems for poor countries and slowing their economic growth. This argu-
ment, radical at the time, framed contentious debates on economic develop-
ment for the 1960s and 1970s; it led to the establishment in 1964 of the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which resulted
in the visible counter-hegemonic agenda of that period. Indeed, the Second
UN remains one of the largest producers of reliable social science data in the
world, some of which is original and some of which is combined with
government sources to produce a composite interpretation, which also can
be original.
We highlight efforts by the Third UN to influence the politics of knowledge
and norms. “The UN is, of course, a practical body, and it is right that it would
be mainly concerned with the urgent and the immediate,” commented Nobel
laureate Amartya Sen, a prominent member of the Third UN who has long
worked on the margins of secretariats. “Yet, it is also necessary not to be
boorish in ignoring the ancestry of many of the ideas that the UN stands for
and tries to promote. I think the UN has, taking the rough with the smooth,
made good use of ideas, generally. . . . This can make a difference in giving
intellectual depth to practical strategies.”⁴⁷
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30 “”
analytical team for the Human Development Report had office space in
UNDP headquarters. Governments that were irritated with the publicity
given to their embarrassing positions in the rankings attacked the human
development teams. Indeed, many disgruntled governments disputed the
appropriateness of paying the bill for such UN research, a complaint they
applied to commissions and panels as well.⁵⁶
At the same time, we should not minimize the clashes between parts of the
Third UN and government and UN officials. Important distinctions in views
among non-state actors bear on UN processes and their outcomes. For
instance, the contrast is sharp between the perspectives of most NGOs and
the far more significant influence of corporations over the content of norms in
the public health arena—breastfeeding versus infant formula is one example—
or in negotiations for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) and SDGs. The role of some non-state actors in impeding effective
implementation of UN standards in such national jurisdictions as women’s
rights also are indicative of the types of power and ideological differences
within segments of the Third UN. The double-edged sword of the increased
non-core financing by governments and by private business and philanthropic
sources adds to the complexity of understanding the impact of the three
United Nations.⁵⁷
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80000
70000
60000
50000
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30000
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10000
0
1909
1954
1958
1962
1966
1970
1976
1978
1983
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1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
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2003
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2011
2013
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IGO NGO Total
Figure 1.2 Historical overview of the number of IGOs and INGOs, 1909–2017