Becoming Capable: Empowerment, Improvement, and New Standards of Good Governance in the UN's Capacity Building Agenda

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how the United Nations (UN) constructs capacity across its development and environmental discourses, and how these constructions inform its political rationality. I also examine how this construction of capacity is engaged and reshaped across several of the UN's core constituencies, including its member states, civil society organizations, and beneficiaries of its development projects. I adopt a Foucauldian approach to power, theorizing the UN as a governmental actor and framing discourse as a productive relation shaping the UN's operations and relationship to its constituencies. This project undertakes institutional ethnography of ten official texts across the UN's development and environmental discourses, attending to how gendered, neoliberal, and neocolonial logics inform the UN's constructions of capacity. It also explores three case studies, adopting Foucault's characterization of "counter-conduct" to explore how key UN constituencies contest, transform, and renegotiate the UN's construction of capacity for their own ends. Through this analysis, I show the UN constructs capacity as an essential and multifaceted apparatus designed to expand, legitimate, and evolve its discursive authority over its development and environmental agendas. It does so through adopting a thematic emphasis on capacity building as a technology of both empowerment and improvement, allowing the UN to govern in accordance with these dual themes to satisfy its dual mandate to promote human well-being and to preserve the stability of the international order. I also illustrate that capacity emerges as a common discursive terrain for both the legitimation and subversion of the UN's political rationality, as the UN reshapes and reconfigures its development and environmental discourses in ways designed to respond to such contestations. Ultimately, this dissertation underscores the centrality of capacity as an apparatus of UN governmentality while also serving as a space of political possibility for key constituencies to pursue their own visions of empowerment and improvement.