This study aims to explore how multilateral diplomacy and in particular the United Nations system has created and developed a specific intellectual capital available for the international community as a global public good.
The paper analyses several intellectual constructs elaborated by the United Nations in various stages of its history transformed into political decisions and actions derived therefrom. All evolutions are considered in their organizational and geopolitical contexts .
The collective approach on development was indeed fragmented, reflecting changes in the geopolitical configuration in which the United Nations system worked. However, seen retrospectively, it reveals coherence and continuity starting with laying the foundation of the economics of development and culminating in the current 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This article argues that, beyond its operational and normative functions, the United Nations has generated a distinctive form of intellectual capital in the service of development. Moreover, it describes the new notion of reform of the United Nations through the creation and promotion of innovative concepts of global governance.
The succession of conceptual innovations and global agendas show how each stage consolidated and refined accumulated knowledge into progressively more universal, integrated and indivisible frameworks. The article concludes that this cumulative knowledge has been the UN’s most consequential and enduring avenue of self-renewal, and that its intellectual capital constitutes a global public good whose value transcends the political vicissitudes of multilateralism.
