World Culture & the United Nations

Abstract

This thesis analyzes a United Nations (UN) sponsored policy report prepared by two research institutions titled Unlocking a Better Future, which sought to guide leaders on sustainable development and centers the idea that system-wide change requires new social norms. Drawing on Sewell’s 1999 treatise on culture, and the research programme of World-Society Theory (WST), I ask what factors constrain the UN as a sociocultural institution, one that develops and propagates norms, principles, and shared social understandings, and how are they expressed in Unlocking a Better Future? I find that the UN’s norm-building is constrained by its ability to be coherent across complex political arrangements and policy domains; by lacking real authority in a ‘polycentric’ governance system; by contradictory/conflictual elements inherent to norms that create change faster than they can be resolved; and by using rationalized logics that are cumulative and do not account well for alternative social understandings and worldviews.