ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the rehabilitation of the multinational corporation at the UN because the trajectory from Code to Compact is instructive for thinking about the broader transformation in development discourse that occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Most accounts of this shift from ‘developmentalism’ to ‘globalization’ focus on structural changes in the international economy and the implications of these changes for the developing world, as the policy prescriptions of the new orthodoxy became institutionalized in post-crisis regimes and structural adjustment programs. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) signaled a development in the consolidation of Third World influence within the United Nations that began with the Asian-African Bandung conference in April 1955. The Code of Conduct, and the broader NIEO agenda of which it was part, was an effort by the G-77 to define development as the politics of recognition and redistribution.