| Pressure towards consensus now dominates almost all multilateral efforts at global problem solving and, as a result, it is imperative that scholars examine the process through which this consensus is built. The central question concerns why consensus is possible in the case of some of these multilateral decisions and not others? These issues are investigated by focusing on one forum for global policy, the United Nations General Assembly, where 185 Member States must try to reconcile their potentially diverse interests in search of a consensus on complex problems.; The dissertation draws on organizational theory, international relations scholarship, and descriptive accounts of UN politics to develop three different perspectives on the central dynamics of global consensus building: formal institutions, strategic bargaining, and informal networking. The contributions of these perspectives are synthesized into a framework which contains a series of propositions capturing the factors that are said to influence the internal processes of international organizations. Once the propositions are presented, the dissertation draws on UN documents and targeted interviews to explore their leverage in explaining the consensus building process that characterized four recent Assembly decisions: the 1991 debate on humanitarian assistance, the 1994 effort to renegotiate the Law of the Sea, the 1996 discussions on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the ongoing desire to reform the Security Council.; As a result, this dissertation makes three contributions to scholarly understanding of global consensus building. First, it explicitly focuses on the internal political processes of an international organization, a crucial area of concern which has been neglected over the past two decades of international organization research. Second, it identifies the six factors which have the most direct impact on whether or not a consensus will be reached in the UN context: negotiating groups, leadership, issue salience, brokers, informal contacts, and personal characteristics. Third, the dissertation offers a revised decisionmaking framework that could also be tested in other international organizations and global conferences, thereby further advancing our understanding of the dynamics of global consensus building more generally. |
