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UN Performance Problems UN Management Accountability Struggles Where is the Rule of Law? Inadequate UN Oversight Recent Developments
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SUBSECTION TABLE OF CONTENTS:
-- The General Assembly, plus …
The
major defects of UN Secretariat management accountability, management
systems, and internal and external oversight units ensure a very weak UN
management culture. This
culture has proven highly resistant to all attempts to bring it into the
21st (let alone the late 20th) century. The UN has fallen far well behind
efforts of all other types of organizations to establish good governance
and produce sound results. The
General Assembly, which is supposed to oversee, guide, and reform the
dysfunctional UN culture is of little help, because the jumbled UN
legislative bodies themselves have great operational and structural
difficulties. One
need look no farther back than the autumn of 2003 and Secretary-General
Annan himself to confirm the sorry state of UN legislative readiness and
efficiency: "Secretary-General Kofi Annan said
Monday that the United Nations must consider sweeping reforms in the wake
of the Iraq war and warned that the organization had lost the confidence
of many across the globe. In unusually strong language that
reflected strains over the crisis in Baghdad, Annan suggested that the
credibility of the Security Council, the General Assembly, and other UN
bodies was at stake. 'If they are to regain their
authority, they may need radical reform,' Annan said
… 'We can no longer take it for
granted that our multilateral institutions are strong enough to cope with
all these challenges,' Annan wrote, saying UN members should ask
themselves whether the existing structure is 'adequate for the task we
have before us.' … He also criticized the 191-member
General Assembly for lacking priorities, the Security Council for being
undemocratic and the UN Trusteeship Council for failing to perform
…" "UN
needs big changes, Annan says," International Herald Tribune,
September 9, 2003.
While the General
Assembly has thus been largely frozen in a time warp, however, parliaments
and legislatures in Member States worldwide (and in some other
international organizations) have made significant efforts to improve
their legislative decision-making, oversight, and processes. They know
that they must continue to change in order to keep up with the executive
branches of government. "The latter half of the 20th
century saw the increasing dominance of the executive branch of government
over the policy process … More recently, a wave of organizational and
procedural reforms … [have sought to modernize] public administration …
[However,] the law making assemblies which formulate the policies which
public administrators are charged with implementing [have remained
relatively unscathed.]. An [administrative] exploration of
… the organization of parliaments, the management of their lawmaking
functions and the ways in which [they] … exercise different forms of
management over the executive branch is … [important and was discussed at
this conference under] three main themes: 1. Legislative
oversight. 2. The legislative
process. 3. Parliamentary organization
and structure: support organization and
staff. Legislative
Oversight. … The power to legislate is
largely meaningless if the legislature lacks the ability to ensure that
public policy is administered in accordance with legislative
intent. Also, and
more fundamentally … [o]nly by monitoring the implementation process, can
members of the legislature uncover any statutory defects and act to
correct agency misinterpretation or maladministration. In this sense, oversight
exists as an essential corollary to the lawmaking
function." Peter Falconer, Colin Smith, and C. William R.
Webster, eds., Managing parliaments in the 21st century, EGPA
Yearbook, Volume 16, International Institute of Administrative Sciences
Monographs, IOS and Ohmsha, Amsterdam, 2001, pp. 1-2.
[emphasis added.]
Very cogent ideas
exist for UN legislative reform, as discussed in the following
subsection. However, the fact
that they all come from the 1994-1996 period leading up to the UN 50th
anniversary, with little if any new thinking since, underscores the
deeply-entrenched nature of established UN legislative processes. None of the ideas discussed have
even come close to being accepted and implemented, let alone be seriously
analyzed, but they still remain quite valid and
urgent. Useful Sources
Joint Inspection
Unit, Chapter VI, "Management reporting and intergovernmental body
oversight", in "Management in the United Nations: Work in progress", UN
document A/50/507,1995.
Joint Inspection
Unit, Chapters VII and VIII and Tables 11-14, in "Accountability,
management improvement, and oversight in the United Nations System", Parts
I and II, UN document A/50/503, 1995. Nordic UN
Project, The, The United Nations in development: Reform issues in the
economic and social fields: A Nordic perspective: Final report,
Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1991. Nordic UN Project
1996 in the Economic and Social Fields, The, The United Nations in
development: Strengthening the UN through change: Fulfilling its economic
and social mandate, GCSM AS, Oslo, December
1996. Beigbeder, Yves, Chapters IV, "Financial control: the auditors," Chapter V, "Management review: the inspectors," and Chapter VI, "Personnel management: the commissioners," in Management problems in United Nations organizations: Reform or decline?, Frances Pinter, London, 1987. Beigbeder, Yves,
Chapter 5, "Management advice and control," in The internal management
of United Nations Organizations: The Long Quest for Reform, Macmillan, London and St. Martins,
New York, 1997. Van Houtven, Leo, Governance of the IMF: Decision making, institutional oversight, transparency, and accountability, International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, 2002. Spiers, Ronald I., "Reforming the United Nations," in Roger A. Coate, ed., U.S. policy and the future of the United Nations, Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1994. The Stanley
Foundation, Making UN reform work: Improving member state-Secretariat
relations, Muscatine, Iowa, USA, 1997.
Fromuth, Peter, Director, United Nations Management & Decision-Making Project UNA-USA, The U.N. at 40: The problems and the opportunities, United Nations Association of the United States of America, New York, June 1986. Joint Inspection
Unit, "Reporting to the Economic and Social Council", UN document
A/39/281,1984.
Joint Inspection
Unit, "Reporting on the performance and results of United Nations
programmes: Monitoring, evaluation, and management review components", UN
document A/43/124,1988. Branigan, William, "The UN empire: Polished image, tarnished reality", Washington Post, September 20, 21, 22, and 23, 1992. Montgomery, Cynthia A., and Kaufman, Rhonda, "The board's missing link", Harvard Business Review, March 2003, pp. 86-93. Hill, Martin, The United Nations system: Coordinating its economic and social work, under the auspices of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), Cambridge University, London, New York, Melbourne, 1978.
Lewis, Eleanor
G., and Pauls, Frederick H., "Congressional office operations", The
Public Manager, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 3-31. |
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