P11.2210 Managing the World Autumn 1996
New York University
Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
September 1996
by John R. Mathiason, Adjunct Professor of Public Administration
Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Graduate School of Public Service
New York University
Reform of the United Nations is again in the air, partly as a consequence of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the organization, partly as a consequence of a particularly severe stage of the Organization's seemingly financial crisis. How this new reform effort proceeds depends at least in part on how the organization is seen in international relations theory, and especially in terms of the United Nations role in relation to the nation-states that comprise it. Under one set of theoretical assumptions, the organization is merely the sum of its nation-state members and therefore its role will be limited. Another approach leads to the conclusion that over the next fifty years the United Nations will expand and grow and that this growth will be centered in what could be termed the management of the global commons. To the extent that the second approach prevails, the United Nations will have to be taken seriously as an international public entity which is a major actor in its own right.
This article explores the various theoretical perspectives that could be applied to the reform of the United Nations. It is based on the assumption that the questions that are asked in policy dialogues are shaped by the models that indicate which questions to ask. In this, a central question is, "what is the United Nations?"
In his opening statement at the celebratory fiftieth anniversary summit, the Secretary-General stated that over the next years, the organization will be engaged in a dialectic between the contradictory of trends of globalization and fragmentation. He stated that:
The United Nations can help deal with the dialectic of globalization and fragmentation, and help solve the problems it will create. This is because the United Nations was designed to be both the world Organization and the Organization of its Member States -- designed, therefore, to respond both to global concerns and to the needs of Member States and as if in training for precisely this moment, the United Nations in 50 years has gained enormous experience in dealing with both globalization and fragmentation.
In his statement, the Secretary-General notes a second dialectic, between the world Organization and the Organization of its Member States. How each face of the organization is seen depends on the perspective applied. The thesis of this article is that, while retaining many of its attributes as an organization of States, the United Nations will grow, in many ways, against the will of the member states today and against the model of national sovereignty on which the organization was formed. It will grow because of functions which must be performed and can only be performed successfully by the United Nations.
It will be part of a process of rediscovering the State, its role in the lives of individuals and societies, a role that will be effectively changed because of the existence based on need of the United Nations.
Management of the global commons will replace both "development" and "peacekeeping" as the main services provided by the organization.
There is no doubt that, when the United Nations Charter was agreed in June 1945, the dominant intellectual model was what is now termed realism, based on the assumption that international relations were played out with the nation-state as the central and, to a large extent, only actor. This is clearly set out in Article 2 of the Charter.
It would be hard to underestimate the importance of the nation-state as the building block of international relations theory. The notion that the relations among nations are a function of "national interest", exercised using "national power" permeates our thinking.
The nation-state, which, as a political entity, combines and reifies the aspirations of its people, providing protection and some public services, and projecting national values onto an international stage, is a powerful metaphor. It reduces the elements that must be considered to a manageable number.
The central attribute of the nation-state is sovereignty. The United Nations Charter states that the Organization is based on the sovereign equality of all its Members. Sovereignty is not tangible, it is an idea, a concept, whose legitimacy is accepted. It presumes that there is, within each territory, some final authority that must be accepted, a monarch or a constitution which must be obeyed, that is accountable to the people of the State and which is recognized by other States.
The dominant, or better, ultimate, source of power in and of the nation-state is the ability to exercise coersive force in the interest of self-preservation. Most states reserve the ultlimate responsibility for public order to a central authority. The authority for self-defense against attack is also reserved for the nation-state.
The Charter, under article 51, notes that nothing in the Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.
The relations among nation-states can be seen as a game of chess, where the pieces are States with different power, where there is a mutually agreed set of institutions represented by the game board, and agreed rules for the behaviour of the individual pieces. Chess, however, is a zero-sum game; international relations is seen as a more complex type in which non-zero sum outcomes are possible.
The realist or neo-realist discourse that has dominated international relations theory takes the central role of the nation-state as its basic pillar. The United Nations Charter, apart from its preamble and statement of purposes, is essentially crafted according to the realist model, with its focus on institutions that shape, account for, and control the power of nation-states.
In a curious way, the realist model has shaped the way reform has been looked at: the focus on the security council, the issue of Chapter VII vs. Chapter VI peace and security. It also shapes the way development assistance is seen in reform terms. Development assistance, like Chapter VII peace-enforcement, quintescentially follows a realist model. The assistance is provided by nation-states, individually or collectively, to other nation-states who receive it and use it in an exercise of national sovereignty. The provision of funds for assistance obeys priorities, or is justified by priorities, or requested by multilateral organizations on the basis of priorities, of the donor nation-states, reflecting, one supposes, their national interest or the projection of their national values. The receipt of funds is governed by the priorities of the recipient states.
The institutional debate is about whether assistance can be conditional, a view rejected by recipient states but pressed by donors, or it can be without conditions other than a general commitment to development. It includes such issues as whether a governing body of an international development agency should have weighted voting reflecting the relative power of the members (the Bretton Woods model) or a universal, consensus-based decision-making process.
In the realist model, international organizations as entities exist as passive servicing bodies, whose function is to facilitate the dealings among States.
The essential problem with the model, applied to the issues today, is that it explains more why problems cannot be resolved than why they are. No rational calculation of narrow national interest, for example, could explain why a Norwegian battalion has been stationed in the UNIFIL controlled area of South Lebanon for these many years, nor why one of its brother battalions is supplied by Fiji.
In some respects, the realist model says that the earth is flat, perfectly rational but where it is extraordinarily difficult to get to the other side.
At the beginning of 1996, the Economist published an article with the provocative title: "The nation-state is dead. Long live the nation-state." It was a commentary on the fact that, in the light of globalization and inter-dependence, the ability of nation-states to meet the needs of their citizens had declined and perhaps, as a political model, it was now obsolete. The article, however, concluded: "Readjust your expectations of the 21st century. Neither the age of superstates, nor the end of all states, is about to happen."
There is no doubt that the economic, informational and political trends that can be observed in the world clearly restrict the ability of nation-states to provide core functions of regulating the environment in which their citizens live. The ability to use coercive force at the international level is highly constrained, and even the ability to use coercive force internally has greater limits than in the past.
This does not mean that there is no role for nation-states: they continue to provide public services, including public order, and they continue to be a locus for identity and the symbolic elements that are necessary for community cohesion. They continue to regulate those aspects of life that can be controlled within national borders.
However, in relative terms, the domains in which national authority can effectively be exercised are declining in proportion. From financial flows to transnational crime, the nation-state is unable autonomously to solve problems that impinge on its citizens.
Indeed, it can be observed at international level, that nation-states increasingly negotiate in groups and coalitions. Few states are able to participate effectively as individual actors.
These phenomena have led to a search for another paradigm that can explain what is happening in international relations.
For much of the history of the United Nations, work in economic and social development has been a major preoccupation. Growth in the organization, especially in the long period in which the organization played a relatively minor role in peace and security, centered on development and development assistance. In resource terms, development was the largest type of expenditure, larger, even than peace and security and humanitarian.
In 1992, total contributions of governments and other sources to United Nations funds and programmes totaled $4.8 billion to which should be added $870 million to the operational activities of the Specialized Agencies. In addition, $336 million was contributed to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, $4 billion to the International Development Association, $1 billion in capital subscription payments to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). The contributions totaled some $11.2 billion. This contrasted with some $6 billion expended for peace and security and humanitarian operations.
This may well represent, in real terms, the high water mark for development assistance, since in subsequent years there has been a decline in funds available for development. Indeed, in the next years, confronted with competing claims for resources destined by national parliaments for international activities and by a general reluctance to allocate public resources for "foreign aid", the decline is expected to be precipitate. Indeed, the effort to elaborate an agenda for development involves a questioning of the entire approach that has been taken over fifty years. Considering the work on the agenda as part of the reform process indicates that it is expected to have institutional consequences.
An examination of the United Nations Charter shows that when that document was drafted and negotiated there was a clear understanding that in the pursuit of peace and security, the root causes of war had to be addressed. It was perceived that these causes were economic and social in nature: poverty, hunger and unemployment. This perception was derived from an understanding that these were the factors that had led to the rise of fascism in inter-war Europe and therefore to the Second World War itself.
In determining how these causes could be addressed, there was a presumption that if knowledge could be transferred from successful economies and societies to less developed ones, the potential of every country could be unlocked and, whether from the market or from public savings, the changes in policy could lead to material improvements in the lot of the majority of people. Clearly this vision of technology transfer underlay the original United Nations programme for technical assistance that was initially funded from the regular assessed budget of the organization. It was a vision carried over when the United Nations Development Programme was established in the 1960's.
Over time, the set of assumptions was modified to include an increase in foreign exchange capital for public purposes, or goods that would substitute for them (food aid, UNICEF equipment) that would provide governments with an incentive to make investments in public goods, whether for social or longer-term economic ends. It corresponded with the rise of the World Bank as a development agency.
After some thirty years of development assistance, the limits of this approach seem to have been reached. "Donor fatigue" is said to be common. The cost of delivering assistance overhead charges is found to be too high. Expert-driven development assistance has been replaced, as the preferred concept, by national execution in which development assistance funds constitute merely a foreign exchange substitution that allows developing countries to use international public foreign exchange funds to contract outside consultants or pay national experts.
In part the decline reflects an overall disillusion with the role and functioning of the State in development, which, in developing countries has been found by donors to be inefficient, unstable, unqualified and, in some cases, corrupt. It reflects the tendency to try to replace State action in the economy and in the delivery of many public social services with the market. There is an implicit affirmation that it is not possible effectively to help the State and it is unnecessary to use public funds to help the market (since private direct investment will do that).
There is also a growing belief that much of what are termed development activities are better done by an intermediate part of society, the so-called "civil society", made up the voluntary action of large numbers of local organizations and national and international non-governmental organizations which, by definition, have a lesser capacity to be reached by international development assistance.
One result is a crisis of identity in the mainstream development assistance agencies of the United Nations. Confronted with a decline in both the supply and demand for assistance, but having a large, experienced permanent staff and country offices, many of the development assistance institutions, like UNDP and, to an extent, the World Bank, are retreating upstream, with a view to revising their mandate to providing advice under the rubric of capacity building. Rather than delivering development assistance, per se, they are seeking to function, at least in part, as international public consulting firms, delivering a particular service. Other institutions, like WFP, are increasingly involved in emergency relief and humanitarian assistance rather than development activities per se.
While the institutions concerned with grant-based development assistance have been declining in importance, the Bretton Woods institutions are taking on attributions as global public finance and regulation institutions. The International Monetary Fund functions less as a technical agency concerned with exchange rates and more as a central bank, especially for developing countries. The World Bank is becoming less an investor in public works and more as a manager of global capital flows for public purposes (including the environment), functioning as an institution that can help attract private capital by providing both public capital and by ensuring a "safe" enabling environment. The World Trade Organization, as successor to the stillborn International Trade Organization foreseen at Bretton Woods, has been given regulatory attributions based on its role of ensuring a sound environment for increasingly free trade.
Taken together with the work of the United Nations itself and a number of specialized agencies whose function is to establish the normative and regulatory framework for areas where global interdependence is a determining factor, like the ICAO in aviation, ITU in telecommunications and WIPO in intellectual property, the rise of these institutions are part of a growing structure whose main function is the management of the global commons.
The global commons have developed as an alternative approach to the nation-state since the mid-1970's. The term has usually referred to those parts of international life that are beyond national jurisdiction: the deep seabed; the troposphere, stratosphere and near outer space and, arguably, Antarctica. These have sometimes been termed "the common heritage of mankind", in Arvid Pardo's eloquent formulation.
Even this formulation has a bit of the realist model in it: by referring to national jurisdiction, there is an implication of the right of the nation-state to control physical territory. However, given that the basis of jurisdiction has historically been the ability (or potential ability) of States to control territory, it is possible to propose a modified concept of the commons.
An entry point to determining what can be meant by the global commons, it is necessary to return to the United Nations Charter, and the fundamental purposes of the organization set out in it:
· "to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples..."
· "to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character ..." and
· "to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations for the attainment of these common ends."
While these ends were, at San Francisco, expected to be met by the United Nations as an organization of Member States, the same purposes can be reflected in an institutional framework that goes beyond sovereignty and it is this framework that is implied by the concept of global commons.
The concept of the commons comes out of medieval Europe, but was revived by the environmentalists in the 1970's to describe global responsibilities for the environment. In medieval England (and, indeed, in many African and Latin American countries) there was land that was held in common for the good of the community. It was space where each household could graze their animals or obtain fuel. The commons passed on to succeeding generations as a whole. It was subject to regulation by the community, but was clearly a public good not subject to private exploitation, nor necessarily to the laws of the market.
The decline of the commons was related to the ascent of private property and the operations of the market. One of the precursors of the Industrial Revolution was enclosure, the process of fencing in the commons and turning the land over to private owners.
The concept was first applied practically in the United Nations context, however, in the law of the sea in the context of preparations for the Third United Nations Conference on Law of the Sea and referred primarily to the deep seabed. In the context of law of the sea, reference was made to the deep seabed "regime". While the terms global commons was not used, elements of the concept were clearly implied.
Again, in a United Nations context, the concept has been extended, at least rhetorically, to two other physical areas that are considered "outside national jurisdiction": Antarctica and outer space.
The concept of global commons can be expanded beyond physical space. To do this, it is possible to start from the two characteristics of the commons as set out in the Law of the Sea. In this, the commons
(a) is either outside national jurisdiction or the ability of national authorities to deal with it and therefore cannot be managed through or by the actions of individual nations, in an exercise of national sovereignty but rather it can only be managed by actions directed by the community.
(b) includes issues or phenomena which are of public interest and cannot be taken care of by the operations of the market.
They are part of globalization and involve what could be termed public goods.
Applied to the world today, there are a large variety of issues, not necessarily defined in terms of geographical space, but rather by a conceptual space which is "outside national jurisdiction" and "of the public interest." Examples of these parts of the global commons include:
· The space between the time goods leave one national jurisdiction and enter another (including goods on the high seas or in the air);
· The space between the time financial transactions leave one national jurisdiction and enter another;
· The space occupied by people who fall outside national jurisdiction (especially refugees and internationally displaced);
· The troposphere, stratosphere and the oceans that make up the global climate;
· Finite resources that cross national boundaries, like band widths.
There is a large variety of phenomena that take place within areas of the commons which, by definition cannot be dealt with by national action or by the market, in acceptable ways. For these, international action has been prescribed, usually in the form of conventions or other international norms. There are many examples of these in treaties deposited with the United Nations.
· protection of refugees (e.g. the 1947 convention on refugees);
· organized international crime and drug trafficking, (e.g. conventions on trafficking in persons, the convention on drug trafficking including money laundering);
· action to regulate the environment (e.g. the global framework climate convention, the convention on desertification, IMO conventions on maritime dumping, the convention on biodiversity);
· action to regulate trade (e.g. the GATT Convention);
· action to ensure global liquidity (e.g. the articles of the International Monetary Fund);
· action to allocate scarce resources in the global commons (e.g. ICAO air traffic and air safety standards, ITU conventions on geostationary orbit slots and band widths, conventions on endangered species);
· action to circumscribe the use of armed force in international relations (e.g. the land mine convention, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty)
These actions must be managed by public action involving nation-states and international institutions. The issue then is what international institutions and in what context. A first step in examining the problem is to see how conceptual frameworks international relations define these contexts since, in terms of how both scholars and practitioners appraise problems and set out policy prescriptions are conditioned by the cognitive models they use.
For most of the twentieth century, as has been noted, international relations in the United States, like most places, has been dominated by the "realist" discourse. Dominant scholars like Hans Morgenthau, based on their examination of modern history, envisioned a world in which relations among nations were determined by national interests and played out in terms of power. Any effort at achieving order involved reconciling the interests of the sovereign states, taking into account their relative power. In most respects the United Nations was set up on that model, especially in terms of collective security. The realists would reject the argument that the commons could be managed by an international organization, since that organization would have to transcend the nation-state as the building block of international order. The best that could be hoped for would be a coalition of interests defined largely by the relative powers of the main players, such as would be found in a peace enforcement action under article VII of the Charter.
The realist discourse does not adequately explain why nations decide, on a broad scale to act together and, in so doing, to sacrifice immediate national interest for a larger, more long-term transnational interest. To explain this, an alternative approach was developed by Ernst Haas and his followers as "regime" theory. Regime theory derives in some measure from neo-functionalism, an approach which states that governance structures evolve to perform functions that are necessary to keep an organism viable. Indeed, in its economic and social aspects, and as a counter, perhaps to the dominant realist discourse, the United Nations was greatly affected by the thinking of David Mitrany, a 1930's functionalist who wrote A Working Peace System..
As was described by a group of scholars in a special issue of International Organization , an international regime is a set of principles explicit or implicit norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which expectations of actors (States) converge in order to coordinate ators behaviour with respect to a concern to them all. Further elaborating on the definition, they asserted that:
Principles are beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude;
Norms are standards of behaviour defined in terms of rights and obligations;
Rules are specific prescriptions and prohibitions with respect to actor's behaviour;
Procedures are the prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choices.
During the 1980's a number of studies were made by regime theorists of collective security regimes, the human rights regime, law of the sea, food regime and international trade as a regime. These studies found both weakness (see Haas' characterization of a declining collective security regime) and possibility. However, like the realists, the regime theorists considered the underlying principle of regimes to still be the nation-state. The role of international organizations, as actors, was still that of a passive secretariat, at best recording and supporting the decisions of the States. The focus largely been on how the regime was agreed or negotiated, but less on how it is administered
None of the dominant conceptual approaches provided for, in an analogy with national government, an independent role for the international organization. And yet, particularly in the context of regional economic integration and environment, it has begun to be clear that such a role is beginning to be played, whether by a faceless bureaucracy in Brussels for the European Community, or by the officials of an abstract United Nations. Theorists of international institutional innovation are beginning to observe an system in which the international organization can be a whole larger than the sum of its parts.
A new development in this is the new institutionalism, a term found in Oran Young's new book International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society. In this formulation, institutions are taken to mean the ideas, principles and norms that govern State, market and individual behaviour about a trans-national issue. It is, in many ways, a revival of Grotian international law and, I noticed in a reference, a revival of the considerations found in Clark and Sohn's study (which I had thought forgotten) of "World Peace through World Law."
There are several elements of this approach that merit particular attention:
· The emphasis on the cognitive and normative basis for international action implies that the dominant form of power is legitimate power - things are done because they are believed to be right.
· The regime is based on a consensus among the parties and it is this consensus that is the basis of decision-making.
· Nations tend to act in the formation of regimes not as individuals, but rather as part of groups of States having a reasonably common initial negotiating position.
· The model presumes a non-zero sum game, and the possibility, even likelihood, of win-win outcomes.
The model suffers, however, from a lingering influence of the realist model: the building blocks are still nation-States and there is no role set out clearly for the international organization as an organization.
While dominant theory of international relations does not yet make much provision for international administration as a component, the realities of delivery of global services clearly has given the United Nations as an institution elements of that role in practice. The practice will develop further in the management of the commons over the coming decades and, ultimately, will be reflected in theories. In the meantime, the discontinuity between theory (in which scholars and statesman are trained) and practice, will serve to complicate the management of the commons.
As an institution mediating between national sovereignty, the operations of the market and civil society the United Nations role needs to be carefully defined. If not, it will duplicate, ineffectively, the actions of the other entities in the global system. Defining that role can be seen in terms of the answers to two questions: What would be required to manage the commons? And, in that management, what value-added does an international organization have?
It is necessary to consider international organizations as actors in their own right. The theoretical literature tends to ignore them as actors, in part because, absent any attributions of sovereignty, it is not clear what their role would be. The negotiations to establish a regime (or a new institution) are, after all, among States.
It will be necessary to change the way in which international public organizations arae seen in order to be able to explore the nature of a "sovereign-less" institution. Some characteristics, however, can be deduced immediately:
· They will be non-hierarchical, rather than reflecting a Weberian bureaucratic structure;
· They will be based on their use of information rather than on the production of goods;
· The will be decentralized rather than centralized, since their would be no centralizing agency possible.
· Issues of command and control would be particularly complex.
It is possible to outline the types of tasks that will grow with the organization. They range from tasks close to those originally assigned to the Secretariats relating to establish the regimes that make up the commons to more complex tasks concerned with the delivery of services, including international public finance and regulation.
Building on the regime theorists, the first step is to agree on the areas where the actions of nations need to be harmonized, international cooperation achieved and international machinery employed. The next step is to define the norms that set standards of behaviour, defined in terms of rights and obligations, that will govern that cooperation. The purpose of the exercise is to establish the bounds of legitimacy for the common effort, the legitimacy which is the basis for enforcing the implementation of agreements reached.
The value-added of the United Nations in this process is its ability to define universal and universally-accepted norms. Rule making is a central function of all governments, but can only be successful if it achieves almost full agreement of those for whom the rules are made. At the international level, where the main actors are nation-states or large bureaucratic bodies (including both international organizations and non-governmental organization) rather than individuals, the process of defining norms is particularly complex. Normatively binding decisions are reached by consensus rather than vote and must reconcile, in some way, all major concerns. When achieved, these norms, by their very universality and acceptance, can be very powerful, if only for their innate legitimacy.
Norms are achieved through multi-lateral negotiations, usually in the context of issue-specific conferences. It has been a role of the United Nations, through its Secretariat, since the beginning to organize and support these conferences. Arguably, conference servicing is what the United Nations does best. However, the function goes beyond the direct management of support of negotiations in the form of interpreters, translators, documents distribution and note taking. It includes the functions of agenda-setting in the sense of structuring issues in such a way that they can be negotiated. It includes provision of the information that establishes the principles as beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude on which negotiations are based. It includes the provision of information on precedents that allow the choices made in one forum to be consistent with the choices made in others.
In this, the Secretariat referring here generically to the staff of the international organization functions as an actor in its own right. Its function, legitimized by its role of supporting negotiations, is to mobilize information from all relevant sources to establish the basis for negotiating the normative framework for collective action. In this, the independence of a universally-based international civil service, is a critical factor in permitting it to gather, analyze and present the information in a credible way.
Thus, the first role of an international organization is to facilitate the negotiation of a regime. This means more than providing interpretation services. It means mobilizing information from which a consensus can be reached by States who come from different starting positions. The information refers to the definition of what is real in terms of principles that frame the negotiation (facts, statements of causality, definition of fashions and trends). This is in some respects a derivative task (the United Nations seldom does the research), but is an essentially creative one. Two examples: the expert group on climate change has defined the parameters of debate for further development of the climate change convention; the secretariat of the Fourth World Conference on Women helped to define the factual basis for the negotiations leading to the Platform for Action.
Given that negotiations on a regime cannot depend (and in fact) do not depend on nation-States working on the basis of stable groupings, it is the function of the Secretariat to detect and broker complex agreements by determining paths and structure of negotiations. It is an institutional expression of what Young calls the role of "entrepreneurs" in the negotiation process.
Once agreed, a regime needs an international organization to perform a minimum of two central functions, both involving the use of information. The first has to do with monitoring the extent to which legitimacy is maintained in the regime through the performance by States of their obligations. In a system where only the exercise of legitimate power is possible, provision of information about illegitimate acts is the only means of compelling compliance. This information must be credibly provided by a politically neutral sources.
The second is the maintenance of consistency in the interpretation of the obligations under the regime. It is the task of the international organization to be the "institutional memory" that safeguards the consistency of procedures to implement the regime and ensures that the modification of procedures, if required, will be orderly. For this task to be done, it must be performed credibly.
Mobilization of information is at the heart of the role of the United Nations, but the question must still be asked, why the United Nations and not some other institution? The question is particularly relevant in the light of the flood of information available on almost any issue, access to which has become increasingly easy in the light of the technological revolution in the information field.
In the mobilization of information, collection, selection, analysis and dissemination are main functions. For information to be of use it must be both pertinent and credible. The value-added of the United Nations consists in its ability to produce information on a global scale that is credible and applicable to the process of defining norms and monitoring their implementation.
The collection, processing and dissemination of comparable economic and social statistics is an essential service. Without information that is consistent and comparable, it is impossible to define what is happening in the world. While statistics are generated in many places, by national governments, by universities and by the private sector, those collected and disseminated by the United Nations have the characteristic that they obey universally-accepted standards and therefore have a base of credibility. The importance of credibility is reflected in the old saying "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics". Without an agreed basis in fact, public policy cannot be evolved or will be ineffective.
Combined with the collection and dissemination of statistics is the process of analysis of information to detect trends and relationships among variables. Traditionally, much of that analysis was provided by academic institutions, or by national governments who disposed of enough resources to provide that service. Analysis, depending on the theoretical frameworks applied, can lead to competing conclusions. The value-added of the United Nations is to be able to use the information it collects itself, together with the varieties of analysis produced nationally, to provide diagnoses of reality which, by their competence and neutrality, in political terms, can help frame global norm development or monitoring. By being universally accessible, this analysis help provide a common basis of information on the basis of which negotiation can proceed or legitimacy can be tested.
The mobilization of information by organizations of the United Nations system has become increasingly important in the context of global finance, especially in the formulation of policies related to structural adjustment, but also in the area of environment. The work on climate change undertaken by the United Nations has permitted the gradual elaboration of agreed norms reflected in international agreements. In the area of trade, the preparation of studies by UNCTAD help provide a common basis for negotiations under the GATT.
For many regimes, the international institutional function is largely cognitive and normative. It is expected that the normal workings of the market, or of nationally-circumscribed public action, will lead to implementation. These are largely upstream functions.
However, in addition, international public sector is increasingly called upon to provide direct services. These include the management of refugee camps, delivery of emergency food relief, the provision of buffer forces in peacekeeping, as well as more traditional mediating services as part of conflict resolution. The United Nations has become involved because, in contrast to former time, there is no national public actor to perform the necessary services and there is a global consensus that there is an international normative responsibility to provide food, shelter, protection, mediation and other basic services to the populations involved.
The growing and recognized interdependence between global economic prosperity, international security and development is leading to a change in the understanding of the international role in the economic and social sphere. While development assistance was always based on a notion of long-term mutual gain for the world, the clear and recognized relationship between environment and development is leading toward a conception that development assistance, involving resource transfers, is in fact a form of international public finance.
Development assistance is not usually referred to as a regime. Although it could be conceptualized as a regime, the fit would not be a very good one: a characteristic of a regime is its narrowed focus to what, in practical terms, is common interest. Development assistance has been seen as a tool for a concept development which is so broad as to defy practical definition in terms of principles, norms, rules and procedures.
An alternative formulation of development assistance, still maintaining the analogy to a tool, is as international public finance for different regimes. Public finance, in a national context, has a clear meaning and function: public savings are acquired largely through taxation and are applied to public investments in areas which, in market economic terms, are not considered profitable, but which, in terms of longer-term goals or the exercise of values, require investments. Areas of public finance include roads, dams, bridges, school buildings, national parks. They also include investments in research and the development of regulatory capacity.
Public finance is accepted by national publics based on grounds that the investments are normatively right and therefore the savings through taxation is legitimate. International public finance is already being accepted by national publics on the same basis in some areas, where what is called development assistance is, in fact, presented as public investment to support a regime. A case in point is a regime for "child survival" and the continued support given to UNICEF. The regime can be said to have been agreed at the Summit on Children in 1991.
An embryonic example might be the Global Environment Facility, which is consciously a public finance extension of the regime outlined at UNCED.
The function of public finance is to use public funds acquired essentially through taxation, to make public investments and provide public services. Resource transfers are now based on the notion that there are international public investments at the national level, which, by their nature, reflect global norms and priorities, of a longer term nature, rather than short-term national interest, and which can best be delivered by credible international institutions. The concern with population and development, and the mobilization of resources to provide investments and services that will address population growth and distribution is a case in point. So too is the increased emphasis on public investments that will address the issue of absolute poverty.
The United Nations role in international public finance, rather than as multilateral development assistance is only now beginning to be examined. Some elements of the role, however, are already present:
· The appraisal process of the World Bank and IFAD has characteristics of the checking of investment against generally accepted standards.
· The process followed by UNICEF in helping States to comply with their commitments to children through the planning and use of equipment support is a form of norm-enforcement.
· The work undertaken by UNDP to package national requests for assistance is similar to the advisory service function that can be performed to link national perceived needs for international public investment to the larger normative framework.
Seeing development assistance as public finance in a system that goes beyond the nation-state model changes some of the parameters of the debate about it:
· There is no issue of conditionality: the conditions are established by the terms of the regime, not of the imposition of the norms of one group of nation-states on another;
· There is no issue of "national interest" to be sold in donor States; their interest is bound up in the common good set out in the regime.
· The issue of additionality takes on a new meaning: additional in terms of what?
· The discourse on decision-making changes from issues of who votes with what weight to how is the consensus arrived at.
The value-added of the United Nations in this field is based on its ability to place the public investments into a politically-neutral context and in a global perspective based on its ability to ensure interconnections between investment in one country with those in another and to deliver the funds and services in a credible way.
Beyond direct implementation is a wider set of tasks related to management of the global commons where implementation is expected to be by national or sub-national action, or by the market, but where international norms are expected to be followed. The function here is to encourage enforcement of norms, whether expressed in terms of human rights, environment, trade equity or forms of conflict resolution.
The question is how to enforce these norms in a world where there is no central coercive power. This will become a central question as globalization and interdependence continue. Here, the value added of the United Nations is probably greatest.
The basic, least costly form of power, is founded on legitimacy, where decisions are accepted because they are considered right and rightly made. Enforcement in this context occurs by showing where there has been deviation from the agreed norms and where, by so indicating, the parties concerned are induced to adjust their actions to conform.
The value-added of the United Nations consists in its ability to bring forward the information, in a neutral and credible way, that can indicate where there have been deviations from norms. In doing so, the international institutions can mobilize other governments to indicate concern, but they can also draw on their links with civil society, that amorphous but powerful set of constituencies on specific issues, who can mobilize people within nations and in the market to encourage conformity with international norms.
This becomes possible because of the nature of the international institutions themselves and the assets that they have developed over the past fifty years.
An international organization can only perform its tasks in a regime if it is credible. Credibility is its greatest asset. Credibility depends, in turn, on two factors: an institutional process that is perceived to be open and, in an institution where most services are "people services", a civil service that is perceived to be impartial, professionally competent and normatively sound, able to obtain and analyze information on the widest possible basis. It also depends on ensuring that these human resources will be available to deliver the required services.
Credibility and neutrality are guaranteed by an independent international civil service, composed of staff from all countries and regions, managed in a way distinct from national or private administrations and financed in such a way that independence is assured. Each constitutes the main assets available to the United Nations in performing its tasks.
The international civil service, a cadre of professionals and other staff whose operational loyalties are to the institutions set up to implement global norms, is perhaps the greatest administrative achievement of the United Nations in its first fifty years. Now in its third generation of officials, the United Nations staff includes people from all countries, a range of professions, who are multi-lingual and who, over careers that typically stretch over twenty years, have internalized ethics of internationalism and tolerance. It is these values, translated into the practice of the organization that make its staff credible.
In practice, every office providing services contains a variety of nationalities. No single nationality is dominant in the service, even though posts are allocated largely on the basis of proportion of contributions. This ensures that information will be acquired and analyzed from a variety of perspectives. It also ensures that, in their interaction with publics, the United Nations staff will not present a single image.
The ethic of tolerance and multi-culturalism is built into the internal norms of the international civil service. So too should be a commitment and responsiveness to the normative and ethical principles which the organization is expected to promote and uphold. This provides a staff that is able to interact effectively with people in any part of the world. Most of the staff, according to internal surveys, have joined the international civil service because of a commitment to the values of the organization. To the extent that this is maintained, it ensures a staff who will, by their actions reinforce the ability of the organization to achieve its tasks.
While creation of an ideal international civil service can be imagined, and indeed moves to protect it from influence, create a merit-based entry system and ensure its geographical and cultural balance pose fewer conceptual problems, effective management of the civil service requires a different style than at the national level or in the private sector.
Inducing the multi-cultural international civil service to perform its tasks in the most effective way requires an openness to ideas and a tolerance for differences in approach and expectations that would not be possible in a hierarchically organized structure. Like the organization itself, where effectiveness depends on legitimacy and the use of information, management is both easier and more difficult than in more homogeneous administrations.
At the same time, efficiency cannot be measured in the same way in the United Nations as in a more narrow, object-oriented, as opposed to people-oriented, administration. An effective organization, as opposed to an efficient one, requires a certain amount of flexibility and openness, which can easily be confused with inefficiency.
Hierarchical and directive management styles cannot motivate a multi-cultural, multi-professional personnel. There is an inevitable trade-off between short-term efficiency and effectiveness. The concept of supervision takes on different dimensions and the issue of motivation becomes a paramount consideration.
The current funding of the institution is based on the premise of indirect taxation. Each Member state is assessed a proportion of the budget (for regular activities and for peace-keeping) and is expected to pay "in full and on time." The budgetary process, like all United Nations negotiations, is expected to produce a programme budget which commands consensus and, thus legitimized, can be supported by all States. The process is good in some respects, weak in others.
The strength of the process is that it maintains clearly that the financial basis of the organization is its public function: the organization produces public goods and services and should be funded from public sources. It is, in theory at least, a rational process with multiple checks and balances. The weakness is that its implementation depends on the acceptance of the agreement by legislatures that are at some distance from the United Nations and which are subject to their own, largely national, priorities. At best, these resist increases in expenditure and do not allow rapid increases; at worst, they fail to pay. Moreover, as conceived, the process does not allow for an adequate analysis of the relationship between the role of the organization and the resources made available to play it.
As the organization moves more deeply into management of the global commons, two separate questions will need to be addressed. The first is the old question related to budgeting: how can Member states be assured that the resources appropriated are being used in the most effective way? Here the issue is finding a mechanism for clearly identifying, for each issue area, what is the real value-added of the organization, defining the role in operational terms and determining the resource levels necessary. The second question is how to ensure that resources can be made available flexibly in order to ensure that needs are matched. Here, the alternative concept to taxation for public finance, charging the users for the services provided, needs to be considered seriously. This can be seen most readily in those areas where the United Nations provides direct services to identifiable segments of the public as well as to the private sector.
After fifty years, it is possible to examine reform needs by returning to original principles. An international approach to solving global problems of an economic and social character is evolving where the order of the Charter objectives is, in practice, being reversed: the United Nations role is "to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations for the attainment of these common ends". Despite the setbacks of the fiftieth anniversary year which has provoked a new effort at institutional reform, there will be growth, and ramification, of the United Nations and its system, to guide, in the name of universal values, the actions of the market, and of the national public sector, with the support of "civil society" to achieve those objectives which have been the defining characteristics of development.
The reform process, which currently focuses on the United Nations in its original form as a meeting ground of nation-states, needs to expand its focus to encompass a view of the United Nations as a public entity created to deliver services that will permit the management of the global commons. In so doing, it must look at issues of performance less in terms of classical efficiency and more in terms of effectiveness, based on a clear and forward looking view of the organization as a public administration with its own functions, personality and culture.
The reform effort, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state,
should focus on a clear conceptualization of tasks, in a context that adequately
defines the real state of international relations. It needs, within that,
to focus on the assets of the organizations and how to build on them. In
the context of development assistance, it is necessary to rethink the approach
in terms of a more effective model, as international public finance, and
take the steps necessary to make the model work. Overall, it should focus
on how the organization's role in the management of the commons can be made
more effective.