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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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The UN has had many strategies over the years, but never a coherent
one. The introductory article
to this "UNaccountable" subsection cited five elements necessary to build
trust in a networked world, one of them being: commitment -- it's vital that
there be a shared commitment to the same mission. Unfortunately, the
randomized bromides and buzzwords that pass for vision in most
[organizations] breed cynicism, not trust.
No more hiding the
[organizational] model behind high-sounding nonsense.
[Also] The company
that asks for innovation and rewards obedience should not be surprised if
its creative people seem diffident. Thomas
A. Stewart, "Whom can you trust? It's not so easy to tell:
how [do]
organizations build trust in a networked world," Fortune, June
12, 2000, pp. 174-175. Maurice Bertrand
recommended changes almost two decades ago (still undressed) to persevere
with efforts toward realistic UN programme decision-making
processes, in order to help improve UN efficiency and effectiveness and
redefine the role of the UN in the modern world. He reached very fundamental
conclusions: "The main obstacle to overcome is
a conceptual one -- the illusion that there is enough consensus in the
international community to allow the U.N. a central role in the
international system. [There
is still] an exaggerated belief in the ability of the Organization to
maintain peace and security and to 'achieve international cooperation in
solving international problems'
Forty years of experience have
shown how misconceived a role this was
Maurice Bertrand,
Planning, programming, budgeting and evaluation in the United
Nations, United Nations Management & Decision-Making Project
UNA-USA, United Nations Association of the United States of America, New
York, 1987, pp. 45-46. "Everyone acknowledges
that the
system has failed to facilitate a better agreement among member states on
[program content and financing]
Wordiness
is still flourishing in resolutions as in [the]
documents prepared
The efficiency of the Secretariat does not seem much
improved.
Achievements seem meager
.
and a feeling of failure tends to
prevail. The resistance
can be explained
as the usual attitude of bureaucracies toward change.
it is also more
convenient to
give an idealized image of the [U.N.'s] generalized role
rather than try to define [specifically how the U.N. might cope with] the real political, economic, and
social problems of the world.
It is always more pleasant to state grandiose objectives to be
implemented at some indefinite date than to state modest and precise goals
and try to reach them by an assigned date." Maurice Bertrand, Planning, programming, budgeting and evaluation in the United Nations, United Nations Management & Decision-Making Project UNA-USA, United Nations Association of the United States of America, New York, 1987, pp. 23-27. Similarly, a third
overall assessment went to the key issue of a UN "trying to do
everything": "The United Nations and its sister
institutions will face a period of harsh reform. Most of the global organizations
set up at the end of the second world war are held in low esteem
. This is odd. The end of the cold war
. has
accentuated the need for global institutions.
. Unfortunately, global institutions
have not risen to the task.
. The UN, quite simply, looks out of
date. By trying to do
everything, it rarely does anything very well. In particular, most of its money
goes into social and economic development. These activities appeal to the
poorer 'southern' states that have such a grip on the {General
Assembly]. But government aid
now accounts for only a tiny proportion of the money flowing to developing
countries. And much of the
UN's development work has been superceded by leaner, non-governmental
organisations, such as charities." John Micklethwait, "The multilateral muddle", in "The world in 1999", The Economist, January 1999, p. 73. And yet a fourth
article underscored that it is often almost impossible to get the General
Assembly to agree on anything, not least on what to do about the turbulent
changes of the past 15 years: "It is also worth noting that a major factor generally untouched by
those working at UN reform is the need for a new political consensus to
underpin the Organization.
Without such a consensus all the changes now being considered -- while entirely necessary --
have little chance of improving the effectiveness of the UN. A new consensus might not be
possible in the present turbulent period of post Cold War adjustments, but
the need for it has to be kept fully in view, not least to underline how
the lack of one contributes to the intractability of many issues facing
the Organization." An observation made by the
International Documents Review in articles on General Assembly
deliberations and disputes in 1995, in the International
Documents Review (New York), 11 December 1995, p.
3. Fifth, a 1992
assessment noted the power of the UN habits of conducting "business as
usual", still visible today even as the world spins ever
faster: "The end of the cold war brought a
boom in opportunities for [the UN, but it] must now reform the swollen
bureaucracy.
. "Australian
Ambassador Peter Wilenski, [a management expert urging UN reform] says the
U.N. 'is run as a club rather than as an
organization.' Notes Edward Luck, president of the UN Association of the USA, 'The
organization doesn't know how to set priorities -- and good management
starts there.' Much of the problem
is an elaborate system of patronage based on accommodating the pride of
member states.
. Another problem is what Luck calls 'logrolling at its worst' in the
General Assembly [as groups of states band together to protect their pet
projects.] The U.N. Economic and
Social Council is too unwieldy to deal with its vast agenda
'Its resolutions,'
says Wilenski, 'are largely unread and
ignored.' Yves Fortier,
[Canada's former UN ambassador] says the organization suffers from
'overlapping mandates' among its different agencies
. We've witnessed
some appalling turf wars.' Last month the
General Assembly took a first step to control duplication and infighting
among humanitarian-aid programs by calling for
. a high-level
coordinator." Bonnie Angelo, "United Nations: Challenges for the new boss," Time, February 3, 1992, pp. 40-41 [41]. [emphasis added.] Sixth, a 2000 article
noted the degree of mistrust that exists among Member States about
intelligence-gathering to assess and promptly respond to major risks and
looming disasters: "Proposals for a new unit for
gathering information and improving planning for United Nations
peacekeepers, which officials see as crucial to faster and more effective
responses to crises, could be blocked by developing countries
The proposed policy planning staff
was one of many recommendations from [the Brahimi report].
Mr Brahimi
[a frequent trouble-shooter for the organization has] said his own
experience as an envoy
on assignments from Haiti to the Middle East and
Afghanistan, had given him firsthand knowledge of the shortcomings of
United Nations information collection and analysis. His proposal was widely welcomed
at first as a way to give peacekeepers, who can take months to reach a
crisis, a sharper operation.
The Security Council underlined the need
for better analysis and planning.
But recently
a host of
objections arose
Many poor nations say that more
money should be spent on development, not peacekeeping. Western diplomats say that this
inverts the order of things: without a stable environment, development is
wasted. In any case, they
say, the
[new policy staff costs] would be small
" Barbara Crossette, "UN plan for a new crisis unit opposed by wary poor nations", New York Times, November 26, 2000. [Note: the report referred to is the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations [the "Brahimi report"], UN document A/55/305 -- S/2000/809 of August 21 2000, which is available at http://www.un.org/documents/ under the A document number] These observations,
stretching from 1987 to 2000, might seem dated and no longer applicable,
but not in the United Nations.
Their continuing applicability is shown by Secretary-General
Annan's grim assessment in September 2003 of the need for "radical
reforms" to enable the UN to cope with modern challenges, which is the
last entry under the preceding topic on the UN as An awesome
bottleneck. Recent grand UN
conferences only raised more skepticism about the traditional UN efforts
to set grand new global goals and strategies, as shown by the two
following quotes: "In retrospect, it is difficult to
understand why United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his senior
advisers
were so determined to organize a summit conference of world
leaders
on the occasion of the first General Assembly of the new
millenium. In many ways, the
1990s was a decade of peacekeeping failures and conferences for the world
organization. The failures
are all too obvious; and most of the conferences, if they are
remembered at all, exist only in the institutional memories of the
organizations that participated in them.
This [Millennium Summit] is of course a public relations
ploy, not a serious idea. The
problems of the world organization cannot be solved by summits, millennial
or otherwise.
Yes, almost every major head of
state dutifully trooped to New York to address the summit -- for an
allotted time of five minutes each!
That alone should have been enough to demonstrate what an
inconsequential event the entire summit really was.
Tellingly, almost no
one at the United Nations today talks about the summit, although the event
took almost two years to plan and occupied the attention of some of the
institution's best minds. It
is almost as if it never happened.
And, in a sense, it never did." David
Rieff, "The Millennium
Assembly", Global Governance, 7 (2001), pp. 127-130 [127,
130].
[emphasis added.]
"In the end, the UN World
Summit on Sustainable Development was just too complex.
. The ambitious project
. ended
with a sprawling document that had something for everyone but few specific
promises.
. One thing seems certain. There may never be a conference
like this again. Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark, currently president of the
European Union, said he did not think such 'megasummits' were the way to
ensure implementation of critical environment and development tasks. 'The 1990s was the decade of mega
summits,' he said. 'I think
we should make the next 10 years the years of action.'
. Another shortcoming of the summit,
according to its critics, was its failure to go beyond a general sentiment
to reduce trade distorting energy and farm subsidies in the rich
countries. .... But having made and broken
so many promises at the Earth summit meeting in Rio [in 1992], some say it
was just as well that the Johannesburg summit meeting did not erect
another series of pledges to be
broken. 'Why make promises you can't
keep?' asked Donald Johnston, secretary-general of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development
." Barry James, "Johannesburg summit: A triumph or a disaster?", International Herald Tribune, September 6, 2002. [emphasis added.] Yet despite such
doubts, the UN seems undeterred, and has forged ahead with the old
approach, in the massive, and seemingly quite encompassing, strategy
endorsed at the Millennium Summit. Despite a high-profile follow up
meeting of leaders from some 60 nations in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002, the
UN "deplored the stagnating pace of progress" in late 2003, stating that
aid was "still far short" of that needed to meet the Millennium
Development Goals. In the next progress report in May 2004
Secretary-General Annan called for "increased momentum" if the targets are
to be met and, further: "On peace and security, Mr. Annan
stated that 'I am not even sure whether the consensus and the vision that
the Millennium Declaration expressed are still intact
We seem no longer
to agree on what the main threats are, or on how to deal with them". He added that he felt the UN
system was not working as it should, and asked world leaders to come to
the world body's annual debate armed with good ideas on how to make it
work better.. " "World must forge post-Iraq unity, rich states must help poor -- new Annan report", UN News Service, September 8, 2003, and "UN alarmed at slow rate of Third World Development", AFP, October 30, 2003. [Note: Vast amounts of information on the Millenium Project, noted on the cover page as "Commissioned by the UN Secretary-General", can be found at www.unmillenniumproject.org/html/about/ . In a September 2004
assessment, The Economist expressed some very pertinent further
reservations about the Millenium Development Goals
effort. This week the United Nations
published its annual assessment of progress toward its Millennium
Development Goals - targets established in 2000 for advancing welfare in
the developing countries. The
record, as you might expect, is mixed.
It remains questionable, in fact,
whether the MDG exercise, with its unimpeachably good intentions and its
proliferating bureaucratic overhead, has done any good at all on balance.
The weakness of the whole MDG
concept is that it wills the ends without willing the means something
which the UN, perforce, has come to specialize in. A plan to spend a specific
allocation of aid on specific interventions
could be judged for
cost-effectiveness and ranked alongside alternative ways of expending
resources
A statement of good intentions is unfortunately just
that. The UN seems especially proud of
the progress [toward the goal]
in which it has a vested interest
greater global co-operation on development.
Conferences, working groups,
declarations, strategies, and programmes
swearing allegiance to the MDG
idea, are multiplying fantastically.
In this sense, at least, the concept is a runaway success. However, what this is actually
doing for the putative poor country beneficiaries is harder to
say. Ends without means: The United Nations has set benchmarks for progress in poor countries. Are these any use?, The Economist, September 11th, 2004, p. 78.
The Millennium project
thus sounds more and more like the old, failed "Development Decades" that
the UN attempted to promote several times in the past, but this time on a
much grander scale. It also (as one of the older quotes above indicates)
focuses again on the desire for maintaining worldwide top priority on
economic and social development, although UN funding in this area
continues to decline as NGOs and the World Bank and especially the private
sector become more active, and overall development aid success and reform
options continue to be hotly debated.
As the above suggests,
the UN grand plan focuses so much on development -- which is indeed
a central area -- that other major priority areas get
crowded out. One can
attribute this to a UN accustomed to rituals and old routines, or just
disorganized in its policy thinking and leadership. However, from the point of view of
the Secretariat, it can also be seen as a deliberate attempt to keep
multiple crises -- humanitarian, disaster, peacekeeping, human rights,
famine -- before the global public so that the funds keep flowing in for
this or that cause. Not coincidentally, this process also supplies
multi-billion dollar "life
blood" money for the perpetual extension of UN Secretariat programmes and
posts. In any event, the UN
does not have anything approaching the comprehensive and up-to-date
analysis and perspective that "the world organization" should offer, nor
in responding promptly and intelligently to emerging crises. Important
warnings have appeared which note the grave challenges involved in
assessing emerging global risks and crises, including, for
instance: "The illegal trade in
drugs, arms, intellectual property, people, and money is booming. Like the war on terrorism, the
fight to control these illicit markets pits governments against agile,
stateless, and resourceful networks empowered by globalization. Governments will continue to lose
these wars until they adopt new strategies to deal with a larger,
unprecedented struggle that now shapes the world as much as confrontations
with nation-states once did.
Why governments can't
win [these wars]
They are not bound by
geography.
They defy traditional
notions of sovereignty.
They pit governments
against market forces.
They pit
bureaucracies against networks.
Rethinking the problem Develop more flexible
notions of sovereignty.
Strengthen existing
multilateral institutions [particularly INTERPOL].
Devise new mechanisms
and institutions.
Move from repression
to regulation.
" Moisιs Naνm, "The
five wars of globalization," Foreign Policy, January/February
2003, pp. 29-37. [Note: the
article also identifies other areas traded illegally for huge profits,
including human organs, endangered species, stolen art, and toxic
waste. As with most other
Foreign Policy articles, it also contains an excellent guide for
further reading on these topics.] But just as there are
many new crises, so too are there new ways to foresee and deal with them
strategically. An excellent 2003 article states
that: "All companies
are vulnerable to
predictable surprises.
we have found that organizations' inability to
prepare for them can be traced to three kinds of barriers: Lapses in
recognition occur when leaders remain oblivious to an emerging threat or
problem
Failures of prioritization arise
when potential threats are recognized by leaders but not deemed
sufficiently serious to warrant immediate attention.
failures of mobilization occur
when leaders recognize and give adequate priority
but fail to respond
effectively.
we found that
[some] causes are
psychological -- cognitive
defects that leave individuals blind to approaching threats. Others are organizational --
barriers within companies that impede communication and
accountability. Still others
are political -- flaws in decision making that result from granting too
much influence from special interests. Alone or in combination, these
three kinds of vulnerabilities can sabotage any company at any time.
'Prediction is very difficult",
physicist Niels Bohr once said, 'especially about the future.' Difficult, yes. Impossible, no. Even though many organizations are
caught unprepared for disasters they should have seen coming, many have
successfully recognized approaching crisis and taken evasive action.
There are practical steps that
managers can take.
" Michael D. Watkins and Max H. Bazerman, "Predictable surprises: The disasters you should have seen coming", Harvard Business Review, March 2003, pp. 72-80 [ 74-76, 79.] The above authors, and
others, have quite reasonable ideas to offer the UN on how it could do a
much, much better job of strategic planning and risk analysis in a
comprehensive and foresighted way.
They are presented under Answers: A Starting
Point under the topic of A true global
strategy. Some decisive movement toward
these approaches is very much needed if the UN is ever to contribute to
global decision-making on 21st century critical
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