It is perhaps inevitable, with the change of leadership at the United Nations, that we will now be bombarded by a series of explanations, justifications and excuses from the previous management.
It may be up to academics and other researchers to completely analyze the full extent of UN dysfunction, lack of management accountability and corruption within this organization over the last decade and a half. I am convinced that it will not become “a footnote to history” as Kofi Annan so confidently asserted on BBC shortly before stepping down as Secretary General. It may well become the defining feature of the United Nations during this time that will be remembered by future generations.
Mark Malloch Brown, clearly complicit in the failure of the United Nations system, has already embarked on his own justifications in the following
"Holmes Lecture: Can the U.N. be Reformed?" to the annual meeting of ACUNS (Academic Council on the U.N. System) on 7 June 2007
It contains the usual mixture of valid argument, the confusion between real and imagined political problems and constraints, excuses for operational failures, avoiding responsibility for these failures and claims of successes where none exist.
The problems at the United Nations are varied and complex.
It may be useful to very briefly compare the United Nations today with the failure of its predecessor, the “League of Nations.”
The “League of Nations” failed politically for a number reasons, and only partially because the United States of America was not a member. Although not a member, this country was very active in the organization behind the scenes. The “League of Nations” was in many ways a good idea, perhaps before its time, and failed because its member states refused to make use of the platform it provided for the peaceful resolution of the challenges of the day.
Notwithstanding this failure, the “League of Nations” was nevertheless by all accounts administratively, bureaucratically and operationally a well-run and efficient organization that employed competent and professional staff.
The same cannot be said about the United Nations. In spite of many difficulties, its members largely seem to consider it a useful and relevant organization, as can be seen in the fact that no country has yet opted to relinquish its membership.
But, far from being a well-run and efficient organization, it is beset with management problems, unaccountability on a fantastic scale and a total disregard for the member states, its staff and its beneficiaries, burdened with unprofessional, incompetent and self-serving officials on many levels, an arena for waste and fraud on an unbelievable scale.
The starting point for UN reform is in fact a thorough housecleaning exercise to rid the organization of the charlatans, the crooks, the time servers and assorted hangers-on that dominate every aspect of the organization.
Only then can some headway be made to tackle the far more complex and intractable challenges that face the United Nations on a political level.
The name “United Nations” is in fact a bit of a misnomer. Its members are far from “united.” It is perhaps better described as a “loose and mainly acrimonious association of superpowers, ex-superpowers, wannabe-superpowers, run-of-the-mill countries, wannabe countries as well as a number of non-state actors, some alarmingly idealistic, some armed and rather nasty.”
It is nevertheless the only platform for resolving the challenges of today, challenges that are often somewhat complex and it is only an organization with a professional and competent management that can get this motley collection of countries to co-operate and to put into practice the issues on which they do occasionally agree.
Often it is UNDP that have to put these agreements into practice, and more often than not it is UNDP that fail to do so, frequently with devastating affects to those at the receiving end of these failures.
It is purely a management failure; there are no political excuses for employing crooks and criminals, no political excuses for the lack of oversight, no political excuses for the organization not following its own internal rules and regulations, no political excuses why criminals pointed out and named remain within the organization, no political excuses for the self-serving barrage of lies, propaganda and spin that issues from the organization.
Mark Malloch Brown’s speech do deserve some comment, the easiest way to do it is by copying it in its entirety, interjecting comments here and there as required.
Here it is:
UN Secretary-Generals are infamous for their reform initiatives. Each new Secretary-General has paraded plans to change the organization, and follow-on initiatives have continuously cascaded down from his 38th floor office, so that by the end of a term it seems a Secretary-General must be reforming his own reforms.
Kofi Annan was no exception. As a career UN manager he profoundly believed in the need. He introduced three major waves of reform: at the beginning of his term, when he was re-elected for a second term, and then again in his last two years. I was particularly involved in that last round.
In between, there was a steady trickle of lesser proposals. Across the road in the UN funds and programs, such as UNDP where I was Administrator for six years, or at the agencies in Geneva, Rome, and elsewhere, we, the different chiefs, also had reform-prolix. We were all at it.
Probably, the UN is the rare organization where the internal talk seemed to be more about reform than sex. And staff and delegates were largely fed up with it, reform, that is. Each new initiative led to greater levels of cynicism and reform-fatigue. It was often dismissed as being about politics, not real change.
The critics were half-right. UN reform is about politics in the sense that it is a response to the frustration of governments and the UN’s other stakeholders and partners that our capacity to get results seemed so impaired. People wanted more from us.
(Absolutely. Such as better and more accountable management in operational activities. This has nothing to do with politics. We were and still are disappointed in this.)
Unable to deliver, we kept on trying to fix the machine. It became an occupational obsession. And for nobody more than a Secretary-General, who, despite his elevated status, had less management power than many of his underlings. I had certainly much greater management authority at UNDP. There, a relatively harmonious board had demanded results but given me the space and the say over budgets, staffing, and priorities to achieve them. And at UNDP reform was better than sex! Staff had seen it work and were for the most part, themselves enthusiastic agents of change. By contrast, the UN was a political bog. Almost nothing moved.
The last Annan reforms at the UN came after the Oil-for-Food scandal. This sequence posed the reform issue particularly sharply, in that was this just about politics. Were the proposals we made, after Paul Volcker reported, an attempt to deflect the allegations of wrong-doing by changing the conversation and talking about reforms or were they a serious effort to fix something? The American right wing, who led the charge calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan and fundamental reform of a corrupt institution, were initially wrong-footed by our calls for reform starting in early 2005. How could they not support these calls.
To their chagrin Volcker did not find a particularly corrupt organization. Only a small handful of UN officials seemed to have been guilty of taking bribes or other unethical behavior.
(Even in the most corrupt business or government it is always only a small handful of officials who take bribes or indulge in unethical behaviour. That is the nature of corruption. Corruption cannot work if everybody does it. Corruption, however, do get out of hand when staff in general are pressured to remain quiet about it and when management make excuses for it. A very typical excuse, and perhaps the poorest excuse, is the claim that only a small handful of officials are guilty of taking bribes or other unethical behaviour.)
Even one case of corruption is too much but it was so much less than the UN’s fevered critics claimed. Billions of dollars of oil revenue appeared to have been directed honestly towards Iraq’s immediate needs, which was the purpose of the program.
(Yes, but the transaction costs were much higher than it should have been, by perhaps as much as 20%. That is the corruption. No business or government accused of corruption has yet made the excuse that it nevertheless also do honestly what it is supposed to do, and many corrupt businesses, such as for example, some oil companies, are also very efficient in what they are supposed to do. It is not an acceptable excuse and the United Nations should not use it.)
The real corruption to a fair-minded reader of the Volcker reports was not that of the UN. The corruption was between companies which were buying Iraq’s oil and selling the country goods and the Iraqi government which organized an elaborate kickback scheme with the companies that allowed monies to be skimmed off. And the principal blame for this probably should be laid at the door of the governments that either condoned or turned a blind eye to these corporate crimes. That was the big scandal.
(Although not as foolish as to put it into exactly those words, this perspective comes dangerously close to the argument put forth by Mr. Brown’s subordinate at UNDP, Erick de Mul, who when faced with the disappearance of funds from a project dismissed concerns with “(UNDP’s) responsibility is limited to the formulation and financing of the project.” The Oil-for-Food Programme was formulated and financed through the UN. The UN was accountable as to how the funds were spent. It was the responsibility of the UN to inform on countries and companies that allowed monies to be skimmed of. The UN did not do so. The UN either condoned or turned a blind eye to the governments that either condoned or turned a blind eye to these corporate crimes. That is the big scandal.)
The UN’s fault lay elsewhere. It was not corrupt but incompetent. (A form of corruption.) Its failures were supervisory and operational. (A form of corruption.) There was inadequate auditing and in many cases little-to-no attempt to rectify the faults that were found in audit. (A form of corruption.) The muddled lines of responsibility and accountability went all the way to the top.
(A form of corruption. Which top is referred to here? The top such as the Secretary General and the Heads of Agencies?)
Where I was, at UNDP, as disappointing was the way the Oil-for-Food Program had become a major income source for cash-strapped parts of the UN system that had no business being in Iraq in the first place. (A form of corruption.) I found that, because of arcane administrative rules requiring us to find another UN entity actually to implement operationally our program in Iraq, UNDP were using a UN Secretariat department whose traditional work was drafting reports and servicing conferences to rehabilitate the electricity system in the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq. Inevitably, little had happened. The lights and power were still off.
I put a stop to this and had UNDP take direct charge under a couple of our strongest field managers. We planted them on site and results quickly showed.
Another UN agency eager to grab a share of the action proposed to build a chalk factory to service the country’s schools, rather than allowing Iraq to import chalk. Years later having failed to manufacture chalk that could withstand contact with a blackboard, the factory was closed. How school children and their teachers got by in the meantime is not clear.
(These examples only work if one ignores UNDP’s own very long list of failures, a very small selection of which is reported on by Matthew Lee on www.innercitypress.com.)
For a manager confronted with such examples, reform becomes not politics or spin but, a necessity and a deeply-held conviction. You feel ready to throw yourself against a wall as many times as it takes and however bruising, in the hope of breaking through and moving reform forward. The world surely could not afford a dysfunctional United Nations and conscience did not allow any good manager to preside idly for long over such a poorly functioning system. Yet the honest judgment on accumulated decades of these efforts is that, while different bits of the UN system have been able to move ahead and improve performance, as a whole the gap between capacity and demand is increasing. The world wants more of the UN, and it is only able to deliver less. (or nothing at all.)
A second part of the judgment is that reform led by managers alone is a tall order.
(Therefore it may be useful to listen to concerned staff, close observers and beneficiaries instead of punishing them.)
Governments need to be on board, and powerful ones need to lead. The reforms of 2005 were based on proposals by Kofi Annan to governments that drew on several panels he had commissioned. These were screened and debated by UN diplomats and made the basis of the draft Summit Declaration in the run-up to the Heads of Government meeting at the UN in September 2005.
While a number of reforms covering peace-building, human rights, development, humanitarian relief, and management made it through the labored preparatory process of drafting committees by the eve of the Summit, the writing was on the wall. Frustrated diplomats still had more than a hundred brackets, as they call them, in the text. That is, language they had not agreed to. With impeccable timing the secretariat produced a compromise text the day before the summit. Key ambassadors were called during the morning in a carefully orchestrated sequence, which included me calling Condi Rice’s delegation, already ensconced at the Waldorf, to by-pass the irascible US ambassador John Bolton. This effort culminated in a lunchtime release of the text. Ambassadors, alarmed at the imminent arrival of their Presidents without a text to show them, fell into line. It was easy to defer to Kofi Annan’s compromise. So there was a summit and a declaration.
But as soon as the Presidents were gone, battle was joined again. Impassioned divisions between North and South reopened: the North wanted more on security, including an unambiguous definition of terrorism; the South wanted more on development, choosing to treat the huge aid pledges made at Gleneagles in preparation for the Summit as old news and less important than having a few extra officials to service UN meetings on development. On management reform, even more damagingly, developing countries chose to view a stronger
Secretary-General with greater authority but also greater accountability as a plot to increase American and Western control over the organization.
The series of reforms to fix the basics that I, my predecessor Louise Frechette and a dedicated group of UN officials had carefully crafted, with the help of McKinsey’s senior partner Rajat Gupta and his team, proposed personnel reforms to allow mobility and better quality of staff; a more rational budget process, together with flexibility so that every single post was not approved by a committee of 192 member states; topping up field salaries and contract terms to overcome high vacancy rates and rapid staff turnover in our peacekeeping operations; (Throwing money at a problem hardly ever manages to solve that problem. High vacancy rates have nothing to do with the already obscenely generous UN salaries. All it has done is attract parasites and freeloaders sitting around not doing much more than gloat on their fantastically unrealistic terms of employment.) a new outside audit committee to ensure real compliance in correcting financial control problems; and proper terms of reference for the Deputy Secretary-General to make him or her a real chief operating officer for this sprawling under-managed organization. Pretty much all of the management reforms, despite the summit leaders’ endorsement either went down in flames at once or through less dramatic, but no less lethal, attrition over time. What was let through was hollow and silly. Our proposals had been were blocked by diplomats who cared little about management but a lot about politics.
Despite the finding of Volcker that the Secretary-General and his Deputy did not know who was in charge of Oil-for-Food, I served my time as Deputy without a terms of reference because the Secretary-General and I concluded it would be too controversial to commit anything to paper. It would be opposed on principle as an attempted Western coup. More power for a British deputy would mean less power for an African Secretary-General. In truth, however, nothing disempowers a chief more than having no deputy with clearly delegated responsibilities.
The political stubbornness was management folly.
(This requires some clarification. The Secretary General employs, unilaterally and without transparency his old friend as a new deputy without any terms of reference, to resolve, amongst other things, the un-transparent, unilateral employment of friends as senior staff without terms of reference?)
There was, though, provocation. Paul Volcker himself, as an American chair of the Oil-for-Food investigation, was seen by many ambassadors to be adding fuel to trumped-up Washington charges. Therefore, much of the membership had already made its mind up about his report before it was received. It was dead on arrival. Few wanted to be seen as embracing reform as a consequence of an American neoconservative witch hunt against Kofi Annan and the UN.
This was to miss Paul Volcker’s own disquiet with the allegations and the political name-calling. His calm investigation into the facts took the air out of the five congressional investigations and the almost daily tirades of Fox News and the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. His investigations established the truth and arguably saved the UN. But his argument about thenecessity of major management reform was lost in the hubbub.
The greater provocation came, though, from America’s accidental ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. He had arrived in July 2005 banished from the State Department, but needing a prominent position, with a well-advertised anti-UN record. The Wall Street Journal, in trumpeting his credentials, several times in editorials referred to my imprudent partial endorsement.
Seeking a silver lining, I had told them that if he became a champion of reforms at the UN, he would be better placed than anyone else to sell them to Washington. No one would suspect him of going soft on the UN.
By July when he arrived, the drumbeat of reform was loud in both New York, as the delegates ploughed on with their negotiations of a summit reform text. Indeed, my main fear was that Bolton might try to trump our proposals with something even more far-reaching and therefore less likely to succeed. However, he adopted our proposals without ever quite saying so.
It was quickly evident he did not have the knowledge of management in general or the workings of the UN in particular to come up with anything of his own. Nor was it ever clear whether his real intent was to reform or wreck the UN.
With antagonism towards John Bolton running high, the consent of the world leaders was a hollow victory. As soon as they had left New York, the ambassadors fell on each other again, full of recrimination and score-settling. Dumisani Kumalo, who was South Africa’s ambassador and chairman of the G-77, led the developing countries in their growing opposition to any more talk of Western reforms. Bolton threatened to block the new two years’ budget, due to start in January 2006, to force agreement to the reforms. Developing country counterparts, who seemed almost as keen to provoke a shutdown, convinced themselves that closing down the UN would backfire on him in the same way Newt Gingrich’s similar budgetary action, closing down the American Federal Government, had boomeranged a decade earlier in Washington. Annan and I considered this a real conceit. Many, not just on the right, would have seen the UN’s shuttered headquarters on Manhattan’s First Avenue as a victory and the world was unlikely to launch into a crisis as a result. The field operations, which by contrast would have been quickly missed because they kept the peace and saved lives, would for an odd budgetary quirk have carried on much as before. So, instead we brokered a deal to put the budget on a six-month installment while negotiations on reform acrimoniously continued.
The mood just got worse. By the middle of 2006, the reformers essentially threw in the towel. The budget cap was lifted and face was saved with a few positive comments by all sides, including pious comments from Dumisani Kumalo about the G-77’s commitment to reform. Then, it was back to business as dysfunctional usual.
A couple of important new institutions had been squeezed through: the Human Rights Council and the Peacebuilding Commission. To have failed to follow through on the Leaders’ Summit commitment to those two institutions would have been too public an act of insubordination by ambassadors to their political masters. Other than that, though, reform was now reduced to what we could press through under our limited executive powers. Where later inter-governmental approval was necessary, we gambled on the inter-governmental mood improving. We focused on personnel reform. First, we tried to tackle a running sore of the UN, the backroom deals that that surrounded the top appointments. We began to publish short lists of candidates for the most senior jobs, along with job descriptions and criteria for the selection. We also reached out widely to governments but also NGOs for candidates, as well as conducting our own parallel search efforts. We began to use headhunters.
This was quickly noticed. At the same time as the World Bank Board was loyally rubberstamping the closed selection by the White House of Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department deputy and neo-conservative architect of the Iraq War a real development professional Kemal Dervis, a Turkish economist and governmental reformer with decades of developmental experience, emerged from one of the first of these processes as the new head of UNDP. The contrast (What contrast? Surely you mean the similarities?) could not have been more marked.
(A worthwhile sentiment but a bit pointless if UNDP then continues as wasteful, unaccountable, corrupt and inefficient as it had been under Mark Malloch Brown. The only real difference between Kemal Dervis and Mark Malloch Brown is the fact that Mr. Dervis, rather than making a fool of himself by himself, prefers to make use of his lapdog, the failed Dutch politician, Ad Melkert to make inappropriate and offensive public statements.)
Soon, we had similarly good outcomes for, among others, the selection of the new High Commissioner for Refugees, the Under Secretary-Generals for Oversight (but still no oversight) and children in armed conflict and the head of the UNEP, among others.
We also put senior people onto a much more accountable contract, as they had become almost impossible to remove. We added a clause reminding them that they served at the pleasure of the Secretary-General and that he reserved the right to remove them with three months’ notice.
Reflecting on our rocky path, I had concluded by the middle of 2006 that, while a Secretary-General could drive reform with smart proposals that countries could rally around in a way they never would if an individual country proposed them, there was no alternative to a real commitment by countries to a better UN. If they remained outside, lobbing grenades at reform, we could not progress.
By mid 2006, I had had enough. My frustration went much deeper than John Bolton. It seemed to me that the United States had to be the indispensable partner in UN reform. It was the architect of the institution and no major innovations had occurred without its sponsorship and, usually, leadership. Perversely, although its motives and positions often evoked the most suspicion and hostility, countries liked to be able to fall in with the United States. They deferred to American leadership and had done so repeatedly over sixty years. The speed with which the new US Ambassador Zal Khalilzad has been able to turn around the mood in New York indicates this. Diplomats want to get on with America.
The US, long before John Bolton or the Bush Administration, had treated its UN role as a casual seigniorial right, rather than as a unique diplomatic authority to be cultivated and invested in. The United States would use the UN when it suited it, but did little or nothing to speak up for it or support it in between. And when the UN was not convenient, it was equally casually discarded. I would grumble that we were like a menu from which the US ordered sparingly on a la carte basis. There was no recognition that, to make the UN function effectively, it was necessary to buy all the courses, we were a prix fix deal!
By the early summer of 2006, with reform failing, it seemed the time had come to try to appeal directly to the American people. A forum presented itself in a conference on US foreign policy by the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress. While the speakers were bi-partisan, the organizers had a distinct Democratic Party hue. But I chose not to wait for a more neutral forum. The speech, or at least the speaker, could not wait.
Carefully with no mention of Bolton and no direct criticism of President Bush, I laid out the complaint: the US took the UN for granted. Presidents and their administrations had lost the habit of standing up for the UN against its critics and of educating Americans in the UN’s usefulness to American foreign policy objectives.
(Maybe it would have been more constructive and useful to restrict this attack to the present US administration and specific representatives of the American government rather than the American people. To be anti-American these days is nothing original. Anybody with half a brain, including a very large percentage of the American population, even the Fox-news-watching-middle-Americans, have many serious concerns about the present American administration.)
The location, the speaker, and the theme were too much for Bolton, who was quickly at his microphone outside the Security Council. He demanded that the Secretary-General disown it and that I apologize. Neither happened, and indeed in his closing weeks in office Kofi Annan gave a similar speech from the Truman Library where he was able to gently compare American leadership then and now. What Bolton’s outburst did do, however, was allow my speech to become defining in terms of the US-UN relationship. In perhaps the best barometer of impact, the
Bolton-Malloch Brown spat it made it onto Jon Stewart Daily Show, where Bolton was portrayed as a walrus, and was debated in editorials and blogs across the country.
A lot of Americans and others around the world had clearly hankered for some kind of correction to the hectoring and bullying the United Nations had suffered at the hands of its US critics. White House behavior that had allowed the attacks to proceed largely unchallenged, even as it turned to the UN for vital strategic assistance in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, was too much for many fair-minded people to stomach.
(Any and all countries, and their citizens, that are members of the UN, have the right to be critical of the UN, even if they are then accused of hectoring and bullying, AND the right to simultaneously turn to it for vital strategic assistance. That is why the United Nations was created; for the benefit of its member states NOT for the benefit of the United Nations.)
In an unanticipated reaction, the professionals in the State Department and elsewhere in Washington, while irritated at having to navigate yet another small tsunami in a fraught relationship, were inclined to discount my words as an inevitable corrective in the light of the US right’s assault. What could a pro-American senior UN official do to preserve his perceived objectivity with other states, went their thinking. For them, the incident was further evidence that Bolton must be doing terrible damage to so provoke a friend of America!
The underlying point that my speech sought to confront, though, was that reform in the UN was impossible without the United States. Snarling from the sidelines was a deeply damaging substitute for honest engagement. The United States had to patiently build a widening coalition of the like-minded if it was to press through the changes the organization so badly needed. In 1945, when the US led, the UN was established, an astonishing diplomatic achievement by any standard.
The question for the future is, how reform will be again set up for real action? A new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, is following the path of his predecessors and proposing to move bits and pieces of the structure around. Nothing yet indicates that he understands the scale of change required. It is easy to imagine reform slumping into a long period of tinkering with the UN machinery in a way that allows the gap to increase between performance and growing need.
Events are, however, likely to bring matters to a head. First, that growing gap between UN performance and the scale of global problems will prompt a renewal of calls to address UN weakness more systematically. When politicians reach for a solution for climate change or a war and cannot find it, this absence will build the case for a better UN. And if the direction of global events leads, as it inevitably must, to more such demands on the UN, the call for reform is likely to grow steadily. In that sense, a fresh try at reform remains inevitable and the question remains “when”, not “if”.
Real reforms will require major concessions from powerful and weak countries alike. The inter-governmental gridlock between the big contributors and the rest of the membership concerning governance and voting is the core dysfunction. To overcome it, both sides would have to rise above their own current sense of entrenched rights and privileges and find a grand bargain to allow a new more realistic governance model for the UN.
That may take a crisis. Indeed, if 1945 created a moment of malleability and vision because of war, there sadly may need to be some similar spur – environmental catastrophe, terrorist attack, global recession, a major breakdown of peace. One wishes for none of them, but it may be that we only see the necessary galvanization of reform when such a crisis is viewed as having been brought about in some major part by the absence of the international means to manage it.
So reform is likely to move, from a UN management worthily trying to keep up with what it is asked to do, to a real restructuring. This may occur, however, only in the aftermath of events that bring countries to the table ready finally to do business and cut a new deal on the UN.
That said, some kind of perfect storm where events drive reform seems likely sooner rather than later.
I had thought early in 2005 that we might at the September summit reach something significant, even if short of that. Kofi Annan and I both used the term “a San Francisco Moment” for what we hoped would be some kind of renewing of vows by member states to the organization. Yet what seemed the strong pillars for such a recommitment – fighting poverty, addressing security, and promoting human rights and democracy – were not enough to lift us above the fray between the US and its critics.
(The trajectory of the United Nations, rather than heading for some sort of “San Francisco Moment,” seem to be more consistent with the collapse of other abusive, corrupt and outmoded systems such as Soviet Union style Communism and Apartheid, both of which collapsed under the combined weight of their own internal contradictions and external circumstances out of their control. In these systems reform was likewise an ongoing obsession, until dynamics, driven by and large by ordinary people, forced them into the rubbish bin of history where they belong.)
Understanding what real reform entails may explain why it seems delegates will fall on almost any excuse not to discuss it. Scrapping in the committee rooms and not grasping the reform nettle can look like a good option for diplomats scared of being drawn into major concessions of rights and privileges that have been the bread and butter of member state representatives.
The bar is so high for UN reform because the most powerful and the weakest member states both need to give ground in order to make additional space for the emerging new powers. A Britain or France may need to move aside to make room for India or Brazil. But, equally, small countries will have to allow these same new regional powers a preferred status. The pretence of equality will recede further.
The veto rights of the US, China, Russia, Britain, and France have become the outward symbol of a system still skewed towards the victors of 1945. An irreverent Italian ambassador in New York, when challenging the notion that Germany and Japan might now get permanent seats on the Security Council but not Italy, wondered why, given that the privilege was now apparently being extended from those who won to those who lost in 1945.
In 2005 and 2006, two reform options were considered: the first was to add new permanent members but without, it was concluded, the veto. The candidates would be Japan, Germany, Brazil, India and two undetermined countries from Africa. The second option was to create an intermediate class of membership where countries would be elected to six-year renewable terms rather than being given permanent membership. It was hoped this would lead to greater accountability and be more democratic than permanent membership.
Both options fell short probably of the overall change required. This was largely because of a little-challenged assumption that the current P-5 would never give up the privileged terms of
their own membership. However, the same was said about the European Union, where similarly Britain and others clung onto the veto until it threatened to invalidate the institution as a whole.
There comes a moment in diplomatic calculation, when preserving power inside an organization is more than offset by the consequent loss of that organization’s own power. What is the privilege worth if it is power in an increasingly powerless organisation. Holding more of less needs to be weighed against holding less of more. That negotiator’s tipping-point will be arrived at in the UN, regrettably only perhaps when it is in the throes of crisis and its legitimacy and representativeness under assault.
(Mr. Brown seems to rely pretty heavily here on some premises of Game Theory. Although a powerful, and increasingly popular, tool for the analysis of decision making procedure, it often relies on simplifications that cannot be easily translated into the complexities of the real world. It may also be possible that some countries would rather be powerful members of a powerless institution than powerless members of a powerful institution. It is just conceivable that the United Nations may become a small, poorly funded organization based in the Balkans or Sudan, that concerns itself exclusively with mitigating the consequences of intractable conflicts and that the real work of conflict prevention, development, health, education and so on will be done by a range of newer, more streamlined dedicated institutions created for that purpose. These may perhaps be based at regional levels rather than as international institutions. It may be a mistake to assume the existence of the United Nations as a given.)
The reform that emerges will need, however, to have a built-in flexibility that will selfadjust representation arrangements as power shifts. The mistake of 1945 was to set a particular order and privileges in stone. As the last decades have shown, countries can rise or fall very fast.
The need is to be able to correct their representation in a low-key semi-mechanical, self adjusting way that avoids a political showdown.
My successor as administrator of UNDP, Kemal Dervis, has proposed a weighted voting system for the Security Council similar to that of the World Bank. Unlike the World Bank, countries would not formally vote on behalf of their region or constituency on security matters.
Nevertheless, one can imagine a country’s weighting being determined by GDP, population, UN financial contributions, and peacekeeping and aid levels. We slipped in the latter three conditions of global good citizenship to the election criteria for the new Peacebuilding Commission. There are early signs that it is creating a little bit of healthy competitive pressure between candidates as they seek to prove their eligibility.
Reform of the Security Council can easily lead one to sound like an institutional chiropractor. If only this critical piece of the organization’s spine is properly aligned around members that are thought to represent the world as it is today, goes the hope, then the alignment will fall down through the lower spine, arms, and legs as the whole UN body politic recalibrates itself.
The resuscitation of the developing countries’ opposition lobby, the G-77, certainly owes a lot to this fight for a more representative Security Council. The G-77 had become a club for hardliners like Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria until India, Brazil, South Africa, and others essentially revived it as a means of confronting the West on UN reform and thereby ultimately securing membership of the Security Council.
Perhaps even more than adjusting vertebrae, such a change could draw the poison from discussion. Each intergovernmental forum from the Human Rights Council, the management and budget committees, the Economic and Social Council, the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinians, and the rest of the alphabetic cacophony of committees, councils, and governing boards exhibit the same distorted behavior patterns. Each has become about politics and point-scoring. The proper work has too often been jettisoned.
Hopefully, therefore, one could envisage the fever receding; the Human Rights Council becoming a serious deliberative place where delegates of real stature debate countries’ performance and behavior against objective human rights criteria rather than crude political targets; the Fifth Committee, which covers budget and administrative matters, might recognize that a group of almost 200 generally-junior diplomats, one from each country, with little management experience, is not the best way to manage the affairs of the institution, and so begin by reforming themselves, either by creating small professional sub-committees or by promoting external control mechanisms like an audit and oversight committee whose membership would be of the highest professional standards; when the Economic and Social Council ends its interminable discussions of abstract development objectives and policies and becomes a very practical inter-ministerial committee for the Millennium Development Goals, tracking progress, identifying problems, building agreement between donors and poor countries for corrective solutions. In other words an inter-governmental system that works to make the world a better place.
The World Bank, which has struggled for years under the handicap of having its President chosen in the White House and its policies allegedly too much under the thumb of its Washington neighbor the US Treasury, has been struggling with the composition of its Board.
Too easily, vital issues like corruption, universal primary education, or economic reform become hopelessly politicized by both sides. Then, lending slows up, projects become ever more timid in their scope, and political support from donors and recipient countries alike starts to slip away. Paul Wolfowitz became engulfed in the kind of leadership crisis that this lack of legitimacy and acceptance engenders.
Getting a stable inter-governmental platform, where all have a voice but one weighted to power and contribution, is a vital foundation step to a more stable international system. Good can only flow from it, not least if empowered governments leads to empowered UN management.
As I said at the start, taking a demotion to come over from running UNDP to be Kofi Annan’s chief of staff was a much bigger step down than I had anticipated. Rather than a man in charge of my own show I was to be chief of staff, but to the man who was nominally the most powerful person in the UN system, the Secretary-General himself. Instead, I found when it came to management and budgetary matters, he was less influential than I had been. Whereas I had a cooperative Board that had not been infected by this bitter political confrontation, he was hostage to intergovernmental warfare much more committed to its own fight than to allowing a Secretary- General the authority to lead and manage the UN.
What we could do at UNDP on our longer leash was remarkable. UNDP had doubled its resources as a reward for reform.
(Largely by tapping into donations from private companies under the ill-conceived and grossly inappropriate “Global Compact”, an initiative that has consistently resisted seeking authorization of the General Assembly in spite of repeated auditors recommendations that this should be done. Surely inter-governmental institutions should rely for their funding on governments so that those governments can then have some control over what they do. UNDP is not, and should not be, a free agent raising operational funds from whomever they please.)
In several performance assessments by donors, it moved to the top of the league in terms of its client satisfaction ratings and business efficiency.
(Really? Where are these reports?
“A World of Development Experience,” the UNDP Annual report for 2003 claims: “Partners Say They Value UNDP” quoting “A survey across 118 countries” that “found high approval rates.” They then produce the following very encouraging results: All respondents 87%; Governments 92%; UN Agencies 82%; International Financial Institutions 78%; Bilaterals 74%; Civil Society 86% and Private Sector 90%. The opinion of Beneficiaries, the only people that really count, is not mentioned anywhere, but one can well believe that these could be what UNDP simply classify as Other 90% and Unknown 95%.
In the same year Research Conducted for the 2020 Fund by GlobeScan Inc for the Second Survey of the 2020 Global Stakeholder Panel, dated March 2004 and entitled “What NGO Leaders Want for the Year 2020 NGO, Leaders’ Views on Globalisation, Governance, and Sustainability” has the following to say:
“Respondents were asked a number of questions dealing specifically with the UN and its leadership capacity. Over nine in ten (94%) NGO leaders agree that the UN system needs to be significantly strengthened in both powers and effectiveness. Further, pluralities of NGO leaders think it is “very important” that the UN Security Council (55%), the UN General Assembly (42%), and the UN secretariat and its agencies (39%) are reformed to achieve their ideal vision of global governance. Fully six in ten (60%) say the same about multilateral agencies. In all cases, Southern NGO leaders are more strongly in favour of UN reform than their Northern peers. Less than one in two (45%) NGO leaders agree that the UN is capable of dealing with current world challenges. Despite this, only two in ten (19%) believe that the UN should be disbanded and replaced with new global institutions. The desire for UN reform is evident among Northern and Southern NGO leaders. However, Southern leaders (25%) are slightly more likely than those in the North (14%) to believe that the UN should be disbanded and replaced with new global institutions. This finding, which is consistent with global public opinion, is particularly important given that a large part of the UN’s work is directed toward the developing world. While NGO leaders are as sceptical as the global public regarding the UN’s capacity to manage world challenges (45% vs. 44%) in the wake of the Iraq conflict, they are much more likely than the global public to believe that the UN system needs to be strengthened in both powers and effectiveness (94% vs. 77%). As a whole, however, NGO leaders are less likely than the global public to believe that the UN should be disbanded (19% vs. 36%). This suggests that while leaders believe reforms are needed, the UN continues to have a relevant and necessary role in their ideal vision of global governance, more so than the general public.”
And UNDP tries to tell us that they, amongst all of the UN agencies, have almost universal credibility and that people value them. The word “value” is far too vague to have any statistical meaning.)
Annual internal staff surveys showed it to be a highly motivated place with a staff who felt they were making a difference, enjoyed their work, and for the most part respected their managers.
The personnel reforms that we made so little progress on at the UN because of continuous political interference had sailed through UNDP.
(Staff Council Chairman, Dimitri Samaras, gives tough answers to a no-holds barred interview with UNDP NEWS Editor, Nosh Nalavala (May 2001)
Unfortunately, despite the Resident Representative competency assessment, we still have Resident Representatives who are not familiar with human resources management and prefer to “govern by fear”. Abuses can occur very easily if staff do not speak out and know their rights. Unscrupulous managers with threats of non-renewal of contracts, etc., can easily intimidate staff in country offices.
But the results of the Global Staff Survey taken last year indicate that staff has a much better relationship with management. Staff morale seems to have improved.
Let’s be honest. The results of any survey can be interpreted to show the desired trend. If a certain soap powder is subjected to a survey and the results show that 50% think it is a good product and 50% do not, it is logical that the company will use only the good comments in their advertising. In the case of the 2000 Staff Survey, only about 40% of the staff responded and of that number, only about half indicated that things were better. Incidentally, the 1999 survey was answered by about 65% of the staff. I’m not sure what that indicates, but one could say either that those who did not respond would not respond to a survey anyway, no matter what the context. On the other hand, one could say that they did not respond because they are so fed up that they don’t believe replying would change anything. And that is unfortunate. The Administrator is very much aware of the issue and wants to change the present trend. Therefore, for the corporate and individual interest, we must remain proactive.
Do you really believe that UNDP staff has reached the nadir of cynicism or are you being pessimistic?
No. I always try to look on the bright side! But I do believe that UNDP staff does not realize the importance of such surveys. If they answer the questions and report when they are not satisfied, this will be reflected in the results and it will be reported to the Administrator by the consulting firm. If 50, 60 or 70% of the staff give a low rating on a particular question, this is important. If these unhappy people do not bother to answer, they will not be heard. If the consultants receive responses only from people who are satisfied, then these are the results that will be reported to the Administrator and by him to the Executive Board, and no one can argue or blame him because this will be the true result of the survey!)
We had put in tough rules of mobility, forcing people to go to the field to win further promotions. We were able to establish schemes to recruit and develop bright diverse younger staff and to retain and support our women colleagues as they balanced careers, difficult travel, and hardship assignments with families.
Early on we had reduced the headquarters staff by 20%, dramatically simplified our focus, and then required all of our field offices to take out functions and activities that no longer fitted with the new priorities. The savings allowed us to staff up around our new key areas such as democracy-building and post-conflict. We were able to re-fit the organization for what our developing countries wanted from us. In the process, we got faster and better at what we did.
Clearly when I left there was still a lot to be done. Although much stronger than in the UN, proper audit and controls for example needed further strengthening.
(Finally, Mr. Brown slips in the crux of the matter as an aside. This shows that any reform at UNDP, if indeed there was any reform, was at best done upside down. UNDP needed, and still desperately need, to strengthen its audit and internal controls, as a matter of urgent priority. It needs to rid itself of incompetent and corrupt staff and managers, prosecute wrongdoers, correct past mistakes, publicly acknowledge and take responsibility for those mistakes and only then consolidate its activities with the assistance of capable and motivated staff. It is irresponsible, at best, not to do so, and without doing so there cannot be any reform, no matter how much Mr. Brown want to claim that there was such a thing. The present staff are more concerned with working for an organization that has $4 billion available annually; few internal controls and no audits. That is all that is relevant to them. How long can an organization function in such an environment without attracting a criminal element?)
Like later in the UN, I had help from McKinsey. In this instance we all were anxious to learn from them to weigh what worked in the private sector and whether it was transferable to the public sector. At the UN, before McKinsey had given any advice, the company was, predictably, already tagged as an American Trojan horse. It was the enemy, not the consultant.
The contrast was remarkable, and the lesson perhaps obvious. Until the sense of crisis at the UN is strong enough to make governments let go of their own agendas, there cannot be the kind of cathartic recommitment and renewal of the UN proper that is required. Until then, satellites like UNDP or WFP will continue to do well, and at the center the tinkering will go on but it will be no substitute for real reform.
The roadblock to reform is inter-governmental gridlock. A good Secretary-General, like Kofi Annan and a dedicated committed UN staff alone cannot overcome this. Nor, however is it right to single out the US, the G-77 or for that matter Europe or others to blame. And it is certainly not right to take an individual ambassador and lay the blame at his door.
All are symptoms of a system imprisoned in a 1945 structure that set everyone at each others’ throats in a 2007 world. Until statesmen are willing to step forward and negotiate a new government which gives everybody significant confidence of ownership to stop acting like dissident shareholders using any means or device to stop the show; and rather be willing to allow an empowered accountable management to lead a modern UN under the strategic direction of governments, the UN will continue to disappoint.
The world has never in human history been more integrated but less governed. Problems from terrorism to climate change, crime and poverty, migration or public health, security and trade, have escaped national control and the UN is in no state to catch them.
(From personal experience, the UN, specifically UNDP, is in no state to catch the criminals in its own midst. Being abused by UNDP, in one of many letters to them, my African colleagues stated “those who suffer are always us, since it is foreigners who drive the train of deceit.” When these letters finally, after a number of years, solicited a response, UNDP acknowledged the difficulties that they were causing but excused themselves from having to resolve them by stating simply “our responsibility is limited to the formulation and financing of the project.”)
How long can we allow such a global dysfunction to endure? Thank you.
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