UNDP's Engagement with the Private Sector, 1994-2011

Over the past decade, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have significantly grown the number and scope of their partnerships with the private sector. In this context, IGOs have launched policy initiatives and projects that make the private sector's core competencies, expertise, and activities essential parts of the solution to poverty, inclusiveness, and development. As a result, the policy agendas of almost all IGOs currently incorporate the design and implementation of innovative business models and inclusive market strategies at the base of the income pyramid in developing countries. These organizations are also actively involved in the process of development, promotion, and diffusion of norms of sustainable development and corporate social responsibility. Despite the objective importance of the private sector to contemporary development policy and practice, the causes of recent changes are among the least conceptualized and examined in the fields of IGOs, international relations theory, and development policy. Concerned with the implications that these changes in IGOs' engagement with the private sector may have for our understanding of contemporary development policy and practice, this book asks how and why these changes occurred, and to what extent the process of norm development influenced this transformation.