This thesis reconstructs and critically appraises the historical evolution, power relationships, discursive and distributional outcomes of the United Nations (UN) Global Compact (Compact) -a high profile public-private partnership which aims to embed global markets with ten universal principles in the areas of labour rights, human rights, the environment and corruption. In 1999, the Compact's intellectual architects and the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan justified the creation of the initiative on two grounds: the Compact's potential ability to foster more inclusive supranational and local spaces of governance, and to effectively buttress responsible corporate conduct. These two assumptions are interrogated theoretically and empirically. Conceptually, the thesis appraises Robert W. Cox's notion of international organisations as 'mechanisms of hegemony'. Drawing from Cox's critical theory and the insights of scholars who have employed Cox's framework within studies on global governance and new forms of complex multilateralism, the thesis proposes a critical framework to discern the reasons for public-private partnerships creation, their punctuated and contested evolution, structures, and the ideas and practices they produce. Empirically, the thesis provides a much richer empirical narrative than academic accounts which have examined the UN Global Compact to date. Relying on primary documentation and qualitative research techniques the thesis appraises, in turn, the Compact's history, inception, evolution, executive leadership, bureaucracy, local structures in both the developed and developing world, and scrutinises the way in which its four main engagement mechanism operate. It moves beyond analyses which have solely scrutinised the Compact's ethos, and demarcates the disjuncture between the official claims emanating from the Compact's Office and the Compact's actual practices within its structures, deliberation forums and decentralised initiatives. The thesis finds that the Compact has not engendered inclusive spaces of governance. Furthermore, despite a series of internal reforms it continues to lack the capacity to harness corporate behaviour. The overarching argument transpiring from the thesis is that the Compact can be conceived as a hegemonic public-private partnership -a product of the Post-Washington Consensus - that continues to be contested from within the United Nations and by counter-hegemonic social forces