Institutional sanctuaries for developmental sovereignty: the United Nations, geopolitical economy, and alternative globalizations

This article examines how alternative globalizations remained institutionally active after Southern development projects lost political influence. It defines institutional sanctuaries as bounded organizational settings that sustain alternative development ideas through recurring research, measurement, and debate under adverse political conditions. Bringing geopolitical economy into dialogue with scholarship on international organizations and institutional change, it explains the division of authority between bodies that sustain development alternatives and those controlling finance. The analysis traces postwar settlements, Cold War development politics, debt crises, and structural adjustment. Three documentary trajectories develop the argument: UNCTAD’s policy-space and sovereign-debt agendas, and UNDP’s human-development measurement. Contemporary analysis distinguishes diplomatic voice, development finance, and crisis liquidity through institutional rules and lending evidence. Institutional sanctuaries enable development claims to be reformulated and reactivated as circumstances change, while their realization remains constrained by unequal financial and political power.