Shaky Alliances

Abstract This chapter traces how and why ideas of involving private business corporations in the battle against global poverty gained traction within the United Nations starting in the late 1990s. The new, key concept emerging from the late 1990s onward was that of creating a more “inclusive capitalism.” The chapter revisits the growing critique of global neoliberal capitalism in the late 1990s. It reconstructs the works of key business and management theorists, and it investigates how the UN in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially under the political leadership of Kofi Annan and the intellectual influence of John Ruggie, operated in this context of the crisis of global neoliberal capitalism, reconceptualizing its engagement with the private sector as the UN directly co-opted some of the ideas developed by management theorists. It argues that the concept of inclusive capitalism reframed international conversations on global inequality.