Global public policy is an unexplored field, despite many public problems extending beyond the national level. This dissertation applied multiple streams (MS), often used for explaining policy-making at the national and subnational levels, to the creation of the PBC in 2005, and examined the policy discourse surrounding this process using discursive institutionalism (DI).

The dissertation illustrated how the problem, policy, and politics streams came together after policy windows opened with the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq crisis, and the World Summit. While the problem stream remained relatively constant, several policy ideas were advanced for creating peacebuilding facilities that were not implemented or did not take on central global role until the PBC was created. Several policy entrepreneurs were important in moving the idea forward, given their expertise in post-conflict issues and their strategic positions on the High-Level Panel and the UN Secretariat. MS was found to be useful for conceptualizing global policy processes, with adaptations to account for the possibility that there could be a lack of competing policy proposals, multiple policy windows, and multiple policy entrepreneurs as well as political groupings that affect the policy process, in addition to individual policy entrepreneurs.

Ideas related to the peacebuilding discourse were outlined at three levels — policies, programs and philosophies — and cognitive and normative ideas were distinguished. Coordinative discourse between policy actors and communicative discourse between policy actors and the public were outlined. This study of the ideas and discourse using DI greatly enriched the problem and policy streams of MS, as well as identifying causal factors underlying the policy change, but could not explain the coupling of the three MS streams, given the different analytical constructs of the two frameworks.

This study contributed to the policy approach by extending the level of analysis of MS to the global policy arena, and to the interpretive and discursive approaches in policy studies, by thoroughly investigating an important global policy discourse using DI. It also contributed to the literature on global policy processes and discourses and added to theory development in international relations by using policy theory to examine problem solving at the global level.