https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The End of History and the Last Man

In recent years there has been a growing body of literature within political science and international studies that directly and indirectly uses, discusses and analyzes the processes involved in lesson-drawing, policy convergence, policy diffusion and policy transfer. While the terminology and focus often vary, all of these studies are concerned with a similar process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political setting.

Given that this is a growing phenomenon, it is something that anyone studying public policy needs to consider. As such, this article is divided into four major sections. The first section briefly considers the extent of, and reasons for, the growth of policy transfer. The second section then outlines a framework for the analysis of transfer. From here a third section presents a continuum for distinguishing between different types of policy transfer. Finally, the last section addresses the relationship between policy transfer and policy “failure.”

Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy‐Making

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

The United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, held in Paris from 1 to 14 September 1981, was generally agreed to have been successful, a rarity these days in international cooperation when 'What is noticeable is that all these conferences ended in conflicts and there were virtually no successful negotiations'.' In the mid-1970s, the situation appeared different. Developing countries expected that the special sessions of the General Assembly that had led initially to the framework of the New International Economic Order would lead in time to negotiations about the redistribution of the benefits of global economic growth. These optimistic expectations have been disappointed. Encouraged by the initial strength and euphoria of the Southern states of OPEC, the Group of 77 took up a common position of confrontation, which was fed in its turn by the confusion and defensiveness of the West. As global economic growth changed to stagnation, however, the resistance of many important states of the North (in particular the United States, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan) to serious discussions has increased. The fact that a complex web of multi-sectoral problems was under discussion almost guaranteed stalemate, even in an expanding world economy; but in a period of crisis, across-the-board negotiations meant certain failure. The so-called 'NorthSouth dialogue', launched with so much heraldry through the Conference on International Economic Cooperation, quickly became bogged down. By the beginning of the Third United Nations Development Decade, 'global negotiations' were essentially dead-or at least moribund. In Paris, however, an apparent aberration occurred in September 1981 when a wide-ranging package of special measures, designed to reverse the unacceptable position of least developed countries2 on the extreme periphery of the world economy, was adopted without dissent. The 'Substantial New Programme of Action

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2619475.pdf

The United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries: the relevance of conference diplomacy in Paris for international negotiations

Introduction: emerging powers and the UN - what kind of development partnership? Thomas G. Weiss and Adriana Erthal Abdenur Part I - Inequalities And Multilateralism: Revisiting The North-South Axis 1. Assessing the G77: 50 years after UNCTAD and 40 years after the NIEO John Toye 2. South-South cooperation and the international development battlefield: between the OECD and the UN Paulo Esteves and Manaira Assuncao 3. How representative are BRICS? Ramesh Thakur Part II - The Changing Development Cooperation Landscape 4. Financing the UN development system and the future of multilateralism Bruce Jenks 5. Emerging powers at the UN: ducking for cover? Silke Weinlich 6. A changing world: is the UN development system ready? Stephen Browne 7. South-South cooperation and the future of development assistance: mapping actors and options Paolo de Renzio and Jurek Seifert 8. Emerging powers as normative agents: Brazil and China within the UN development system Adriana Erthal Abdenur 9. Emerging powers and the UN development system: canvassing global views Stephen Browne and Thomas G. Weiss 10. War-torn countries, natural resources, emerging-power investors and the UN development system Graciana del Castillo

Emerging powers and the UN : what kind of development partnership?

The United Nations and Sovereignty in the Age of Trump

The year 2011 marks the beginning of retirement for many baby-boomers. The Beatles once asked: "Will you still need me/Will you still feed me/When I'm sixty-four?" This year the United Nations turns 66 and many think it should have taken early retirement. Withholding US contributions--one-fifth of the overall UN budget and a quarter of its peacekeeping costs--is a Republican perennial. And the new chair of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, began with a battle cry on the first day of commitee work in 2011: "Reform first, pay later." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Eyes glaze over at the mention of UN reform. Before becoming a minister in the last Labor government in the United Kingdom, Mark Malloch Brown headed the UN Development Programme and was deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan. He quipped that the United Nations is the only institution where, over coffee or around water coolers, reform is a more popular topic than sex. To be fair, more adaptation has taken place in the UN system than critics acknowledge. Indeed, the founders would probably not recognize the system whose foundations were laid in 1945. However, while it would be unfair to describe the United Nations as in a state of stasis, it also would be false to suggest that the UN system is more than woefully slow in reforming itself. Why does so little happen? What, if anything, can be done? The Central Challenge Why should anyone in Washington or elsewhere care? The short answer is that dramatic transformation of the world organization, and not mere tinkering, is required if we are to address transboundary problems that threaten human survival and dignity. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan frequently speaks of "problems without passports." Many of the most intractable challenges facing humankind are transnational--acid rain does not require a visa to move from one side of a border to another. These problems range from climate change, migration, and pandemics, to terrorism, financial flows, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Effectively addressing any of these threats requires policies and vigorous actions whose scope is not unilateral, bilateral, or even multilateral, but rather global. Ironically, the policy authority and resources for tackling global problems remain vested individually in the 192 UN member states rather than in the collective body. The fundamental disjuncture between the natures of growing global threats and the current inadequate structures for international problem-solving and decision-making goes a long way toward explaining fitful, tactical, and short-term local responses to threats that require sustained, strategic, and long-term global thinking and action. The United States resembles most countries in opting in and out of the United Nations when it suits Washington's short term calculations of interests. Selective "a la carte multilateralism," however, is insufficient. More fundamental reforms of multilateral institutions must be made so that they work effectively and in the common interest. The United Nations' Main Weaknesses The United Nations too often suffers paralysis. Before prescribing how to fix it, we must understand three underlying causes of its woes. The first is the enduring concept of the international community as a system of sovereign states--a notion dating back to the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia. "Organized hypocrisy," as former National Security Council director Stephen Krasner reminds us, is either 360 years old or 360 years young. As a result of the grip of sovereignty, the current international system functions in the middle of a growing divide between virtually all of the life-menacing threats facing the planet and the existing structures for international decisions to do something about them. Government officials and so-called realist scholars of international relations agree that narrowly defined vital interests are the only basis on which to make commitments or avoid them. …

A Pipe Dream? Reforming the United Nations

History holds clues about how to prepare the UN for an uncertain future with multilateralism under siege in the age of new nationalisms. With the UN’s obvious weaknesses on display, including the disjointed responses to COVID-19, this essay returns to 1 January 1942 and the signing of the Declaration by the United Nations. It views the 75-year history through a counterfactual prism: “Would the World Be Better without the UN?”

Thomas G. Weiss

Papers

The United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries: the relevance of conference diplomacy in Paris for international negotiations

Emerging powers and the UN : what kind of development partnership?

The United Nations and Sovereignty in the Age of Trump

A Pipe Dream? Reforming the United Nations

Like a Phoenix from the Ashes