Description
Competition between policy areas over political attention is high in the context of the United Nations (UN) fragmented system. UN staff always push their thematic agenda even if their specific issues are not perceived as a priority, especially in times of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine both illustrate such dilemma for UN actors whose main mandated activities were cast away on the short-term period. This communication presents a framework designed to study UN fragmented agendas and answer this overarching question: how do UN actors keep an issue, which is not seen as a priority, on the agenda in times of crisis? The literature cannot fully answer this question because of three main gaps: (i) research focuses on processes of agenda-setting, without fully grasping mechanisms of agenda-keeping; (ii) it explores functional divisions between international organizations without investigating the daily experience of diverging temporalities, and (iii) it questions the fragmentation of the governance system of a specific issue, instead of competition of that specific issue with other policy areas. To address these gaps, I propose a conceptual framework around the concept of agenda-keeping and two main research assumptions: I assume (i) that to keep an issue on the agenda, actors reframe the issue by proceeding to a hybridization process with the main competing policy domain involved in the crisis, contributing to a more ‘common’ agenda and (ii) that agenda-keeping unfolds through a form of resistance against the loss of political momentum and political space.
