| dc.description.abstract | The end of the Cold War, globalisation and the emergence of democratic political regimes in a number of developing countries had profound effects on the field of international aid. Accelerated by the end of the Cold War and the initial euphoria of the early 1990s, the concept of good governance was used to guide development co-operation policies in a range of international organisations. Today, the focus on good governance has become a dominant feature of development aid and sets standards for legitimate development policies in the multilateral development system.
A central issue that arises from this trend is why and how ideas such as good governance are adopted in international organisations. Only recently, special attention has been given to such ideational questions in the IR discipline. In order to address this question, the present study focuses on one of the most dedicated advocates of the concept of good governance in the 1990s, namely the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
This thesis puts forward two general points, one theoretical and one empirical. First, different approaches within the ideational literature in the IR discipline are systematised and evaluated with a point of departure in the agent-structure debate. The survey stresses in particular the methodological debate between, on the one hand, individualist approaches, and on the other hand, collectivist approaches. The following approaches are discussed: Kathryn Sikkink s institutionalist approach, Peter M. Haas expert-group approach and Robert Cox s neo-Gramscian approach. The systematisation and corresponding evaluation of these theoretical contributions in the ideational literature is launched from the vantage point of social constructivism in order to point out empirical omissions as well as theoretical biases within the existing literature. Second, the empirical case study of UNDP examines why and how UNDP adopted the idea of good governance, and seeks to show that both UNDP and the governance agenda in the multilateral development system changed in the 1990s, in which UNDP became a highly visible governance actor. The case study identifies three distinct phases spelling out the concrete time implications during the process of the adoption of the notion of good governance in UNDP. Phase one from 1989 to 1992, phase two from 1993 to 1998 and phase three from 1999 to 2001. This periodisation allows for a description of how both agents and structures are altered and reproduced over time.
The thesis concludes by taking into consideration the consequences of UNDP s adoption of good governance for the concept itself, for the concrete approaches in question, and for the future of analyses of the role of ideas in the multilateral development system. | nor |