The Subsidiarity Arrangement of Global Governance and Sustainable Development

Through the Lens of the Sub-Saharan Africa-Poverty Nexus

Abstract

In the post-Cold War realm of international relations, the United Nations is "overheating," overburdened by the demands of their expanded operations, in part due to its massive expansion of membership since conception, which has grown to include several developing nations. Specifically, in the realm of international sustainable development, this expansion has drastically increased the scope of UN objectives responsibilities. What we learned from the period of the 1990s, is that the “Washington Consensus” series of macroeconomic policy recommendations anchored around the mantra “stabilize, privatize, and liberalize,” which had failed to adequately instill sustainable long-term growth in Sub-Saharan African, is that this narrow field of market-oriented reforms could not uniformly solve issues of development across the world. Attempts to copy-paste policy reforms from one country often failed, and precisely this observation entails the application of subsidiarity. This paper employs a qualitative methodology to investigate the potential role of a subsidiarity arrangement in easing the burden on the UN system, through a global division of labour across local, regional, and international levels of governance, in studying sustainable development and poverty eradication efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.