Abstract
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is unique among international organisations; it is, in fact, the only universal international organisation that was explicitly created to alter fundamentally its external environment.1 Traditionally, international organisations have been created to do one of the following: (a) to secure a given status quo; (b) to implement, interpret, facilitate, and resolve differences over the norms, principles, and rules of a particular regime; or, (c) to provide a forum for states in which to share information and work at resolving common problems, some of which may be domestic ones. UNCTAD never really fell into any of these categories.
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Notes
This was the title of an early essay on UNCTAD by Joseph Nye, ‘UNCTAD: Poor Nation’s Pressure Group’, in R. Cox and H.K. Jacobson (eds), The Anatomy of Influence (New York: Praeger, 1968).
The best discussion of the origins of the GSP is A. Bhattacharya, ‘The Influence of the International Secretariat: UNCTAD and the GSP’, International Organization, vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 1976), pp. 75–90.
Robert Rothstein, Global Bargaining (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 90.
Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Gamani Corea, Need for Change (New York, Pergamon Press, 1980), p. 5.
Robert Tucker raises these issues in The Inequality of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
See for example, Richard Cooper, ‘A New International Economic Order’, note 13; Albert Fishlow, et al., Rich and Poor Nations in the World Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978)
Sidney Weintraub, ‘The New International Economic Order: The Beneficiaries’, World Development, vol. 7, no. 2 (1979), pp. 247–58.
See Thomas G. Weiss and Anthony Jannings, More for the Least? Poorest Countries in the Eighties (Lexington, MA.: Heath, 1983).
Harry Johnson, Trade Strategy for Rich and Poor Nations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), p. 20.
See for example the interesting essays in Jagdish N. Bhagwati and John Gerard Ruggie (eds), Power, Passions, and Purpose (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1984).
An oblique discussion of the nature and implications of this heterogeneity for students of international organisations may be found in Adda B. Bozeman, ‘Statecraft and Intelligence in the Non-Western World’, Conflict, vol. 6, no. 1 (1985), pp. 1–35.
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© 1989 David P. Forsythe
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Michalak, S.J. (1989). UNCTAD as an Agent of Change. In: Forsythe, D.P. (eds) The United Nations in the World Political Economy. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20196-9_5
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