|
|||||
UN Performance Problems UN Management Accountability Struggles Where is the Rule of Law? Inadequate UN Oversight Recent Developments
|
|
This IO Watch archive
seeks to provide, for the first time, a coherent, independent,
comprehensive, and steadily expanding archive of quotes (and citations)
from knowledgeable analyses of United Nations
rule-of-law, management accountability, oversight and operational
performance issues and problems as a spur to real UN reform. Especially with
its various "Useful sources" lists in most sections and subsections, IO Watch
hopes to encourage visitors to this archive to consider alternative and
independent views, often ignored or glossed over, of what the UN actually
"does". Hopefully, the archive
will aid, inform, and heighten critical thinking about the UN, because
only an informed, skeptical, and demanding public can demand that the UN
Secretariat and its fractious Above all, this
archive is A WORK IN PROGRESS. It is presently in its early
stages, but its content will be gradually but steadily filled out in a
multi-year developmental process, as rapidly as IO Watch's capacities
permit. It focuses not on
'cheap shot" criticisms of UN performance and operations, but on all types
of serious documentary materials that are evaluative and analytical in
content.
The IO Watch archives
development process has a set of major and interrelated
aspects. A. The archive already includes
a considerable sample of significant quotes excerpted from newspapers,
newsmagazines, and UN staff journals. IO Watch began with them because
they are much more condensed and sharply-focused than books, reports, and
even journal articles, and therefore much easier to excerpt. This element
of the archive will continue to grow, both for older articles rediscovered
or not yet included, and for new material, since news analyses are
available far in advance of scholarly and in-depth books and reports
assessing current international affairs. B. IO Watch has also collected
some 700 relevant books, reports, and articles, and will continue to add
to them. They are cited in a
"Useful sources" listing at the end of the introductions to major
sections, or at the end of subsections (and some relevant websites will be
included as well). Key quotes
from the relevant books have in most cases not yet been added into the
various archive sections and subsections, because of their length. This
inclusion will be a major task for the next stage of expanding the
archive.
C. IO Watch will, of course,
also steadily update the archive to reflect significant new developments,
issues, scandals, and publications as they emerge, particularly in the
Recent Developments
section. D. At the same time, and because
the UN changes so painfully slowly that decades-old assessments remain
just as relevant today as when they were written, IO Watch also has many
more older materials to incorporate. In particular, UN staff journals over
the years have provided some outstanding (and hard-earned) insights into
the UN's performance problems and management weaknesses. IO Watch would be most grateful if
UN staff, retired staff, and other researchers or interested outsiders can
cite or provide additional relevant staff journal materials and other
important assessment articles, books, and reports for inclusion in the
archive (for more details, see the Contact
IO Watch subsection of the website.) Overall,
IO Watch envisions that the initial 2,500 quote entries in this archive
may well double or more in the next few years. Most of all, it will seek
to broaden and enrich the archive with additional and still valid older
accounts of experience, many of which have long been buried somewhere in
the "dustbin of history."
The hard-earned
lessons presented from these many sources need urgently to be rediscovered
and made part of the formal record of more than half-a-century (and
counting) of UN performance failings. They should be "on the record"
now, as the UN continues through yet another period of grandly-announced
"major reform" activity. They should also remain publicly available until
their concerns are firmly addressed.
In fact, they should stay on the record in perpetuity, to serve as
firm reminders of failed past UN reform efforts if the various current and
future UN "reforms" should prove, as so often in the past, to be only the
usual "smoke and mirrors." The IO Watch archives
contain excerpts from books, reports, journals, and newspaper and
newsmagazine articles concerning UN performance and managerial
accountability problems and issues and situations, ever since the early
days of the UN in the late 1940s.
They are chosen and presented using the following
parameters. 1. Structure -- Following a brief
overview, each IO Watch section or subsection covers a specific topic,
with a set of quotes on the topic, listed, in general, in chronological
order to allow the reader to more easily locate them and to track
their evolution, ending in most subsections with a selected bibliography
of "useful sources" for that
area. 2. Sources -- Almost all the
sources on UN Performance Problems and on Recent Developments come from outside the
UN, since the UN has not been eager to identify and provide analyses,
evaluations, and reports of its problems. However, at those periodic points
where the Member States have called for management reform, and the
Secretariat has been pressured to provide an occasional mea culpa,
the UN documents are included.
In addition, much important material is buried deep within lengthy
Secretariat reports and other documents. Thus a certain amount of
commentary or summary discussion is added to obtain a "story
line." 3. Scope -- The IO Watch archive, as
already mentioned, is
open-ended and will be steadily expanded. The archive also,
as already discussed, concentrates on the UN organization proper (see
www.un.org ) rather than the overall UN
system (see www.unsystem.org ) or other major
international organizations, whose mass of organizations, units,
programmes, boards, commissions, etc. quickly becomes a very
confusing "alphabet soup" of
acronyms and muddle of varying details and processes. Much of the
literature already concentrates on the UN Organization per se,
because it is the largest, most complex, disorganized, and
highly-politicized international institution of all. With only a few
exceptions the entries are all in English, in part because most of the
relevant literature is in English.
A multi-lingual archive is beyond IO Watch's capacities, and would
also be rather difficult and counter-productive to browse. However, several foreign-language
entries are included as a reminder that there are no doubt many excellent
critiques in other languages.
IO Watch believes that
it would be a wonderful, and very worthwhile, thing if someday some group would
prepare a similar archive, particularly in French, Spanish, or German, or
a similar archive in English for other major international organizations
(on this issue, see also the archive subsection on Top Related Sources and Websites
.) 4. Content -- IO Watch decided
to present each source through one or several brief quotes excerpted from
it, rather than provide just a dry bibliographical annotation or cursory
summary listing. The quotes
are all limited to less than 200 words, except for a few citations from
published UN reports, or where permission has been obtained from the
author or publishers. These brief excerpts allow the
reader to read at least some salient points or excerpts in the author's
own words, and they are followed by a full bibliographic citation. The
idea is both to give these knowledgeable critics (some stretching back
almost a half a century) a chance to be heard "in concert", and to
highlight a literature which the UN has consistently sought to wash away
in a sea of public relations and "diplo-speak" reporting of its
own. The entries all
provide full bibliographic and publishing data, to permit and encourage
users of this website to go "see for themselves" what the full book,
document, or article has to say. This is much easier than it ever was,
since Internet booksellers can greatly help to locate both new and old
books, and the online archives of most of the journals, newspapers, and
organizations cited herein, and the top Internet search engines, can help
to track down much of this material as well. 5. Quality control -- IO Watch has tried
to avoid glib or uninformed quotes, and to concentrate instead on
well-written and well-argued factual documents that present interesting
insights and information, with indications that the author has direct
experience of UN operations, is well-informed on UN performance issues, or
-- in the case of newspaper
articles -- that the reporting at least comes
from major news sources that regularly cover the UN. 6. Limitations -- Obviously, good books or detailed
reports written about the UN can provide dozens of incisive quotes about
UN performance problems. This
archive tries to limit each source to no more than a few specific and
brief quotes. 7. A lighter side -- Although UN performance failings
are very serious and in some instances shameful, certain elements of the
UN culture are both ironic, absurd,
and very telling as
well. A subsection on Anecdotes and Observations deals with
rather unusual UN events and valuable insights. It is organized alphabetically by
topic, and included as the next-to-last subsection of UN Performance Problems
. 8. Focus -- Once again, this archive exists to
present informative,
alternative, and incisive critical analyses of UN management performance,
accountability and oversight, and rule-of-law problems as an indication of
operating problems that affect and trouble all major international
organizations. For those
global citizens who may somehow not have been exposed to the mass of UN
"good news" portrayals of its performance, the UN Performance Problems section provides
a listing of major UN
websites, and publications (see The UN's Official Versions
.) 9. Bibliographies, Related Sources
and Websites -- As already noted,
various useful sources are listed in the introductions to most sections,
or at the end of many of the subsections. In addition, the Recent Developments section includes a
subsection entitled UN Management Accountability Bibliographic
Lists of the most relevant sources divided into books,
reports, articles, and a set of materials on UN field operations, preceded
by a "Top 50" list of the best overall sources. IO Watch would very much
appreciate suggestions for important documents to add to these lists and
to the archives quotes (please see Contact
IO Watch .) This Recent Developments section also contains
an overall list of valuable websites and other sources related to UN
performance, managerial accountability, and oversight issues, entitled
Top Related Sources and Websites . All
these lists will be periodically updated as new materials come to
light. |
|||
