Sustainable Development at the UN: A 50-Year Overview of Themes and Trends in UNGDC
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/w6a99h71Keywords:
United Nations, Sustainable Development, United Nations General Debate Corpus, Keyword Analysis, Collocation Networks.Abstract
The United Nations(UN) has always been a core force in promoting global sustainable development, drawing research interest from scholars in various academic fields. The UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) is widely adopted in research on diplomatic affairs and economic topics, but few studies have used it to track how sustainability-related topics have changed over time. This research addresses this research gap by using keyword analysis and word collocation network methods to explore how sustainable development has been discussed in UNGDC speeches across fifty years (1972–2024). The research results show obvious thematic changes divided into four clear stages: the early stage (1972–1992) focusing on peace maintenance and institutional fairness; the post-Cold War stage (1992–2000) aiming to build global governance rules, resolve international conflicts and incorporate basic environmental concerns into global issues; the Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) period (2000–2015) focusing on measurable goals for poverty elimination, public health improvement and climate protection; and the latest stage (2015–2024) featuring an integrated development model that combines climate action, public health safety and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One major research result is that global sustainability research and practice have formed a systematic thinking mode, in which discussions on climate action, SDGs and health security are closely connected with each other. This discovery of thematic integration provides a clear reference for policy makers to formulate unified policies to deal with complicated and interrelated global problems.
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