Global Policy and the Future of the United Nations

This article examines the systemic constraints and opportunities confronting the United Nations, specifically as an instrument for making and implementing `global policy', in an era in which universal and formal organizational approaches to international co-operation are seriously being called into question. The author argues that global policy entails some manner of global organization which can provide the necessary apparatus for engaging the international system in policy-relevant political-intellectual routines at the system-wide level. The UN could play a special role in facilitating decisions by the international community as to what type of policy device is possible and desirable in a given problem area (norms, rules, organizations, or other outputs) as well as what the policy scope might be (global or subglobal). However, under the present set of arrangements - labeled `functional eclecticism' - the UN is poorly equipped to help determine how much formal institutionalism and globalism is optimal for the international system. Another model - `dirigible pluralism' - is articulated that suggests an alternative set of arrangements whereby the UN might move toward routinizing international public policy processes and furnishing a degree of central guidance compatible with an increasingly subsystem-dominant, polyarchical world.