A UNDP WATCH EXCLUSIVE
by Leon Kukkuk
Whilst the “United Nations Transparency & Accountability Initiative” is something that needs to be welcomed and supported I think there are a number of important issues regarding the nature and origin of this initiative that need to be addressed in order to make it fully effective.
The first and most important concern is that it is an American initiative. One of the major obstacles in the way of true UN reform is the manner in which it is seen by many as a purely American concern, and particularly – and even more disturbingly and inaccurately – as a purely partisan Republican concern. This is being used very effectively by UN management to detract from the central imperative of UN reform - that the UN and its agencies must start working effectively in those countries and communities where UN programmes, peace keeping missions and emergency relief are being implemented.
An article “Running Amok with John Bolton” by Mike Whitney and published by OpEdNews.com on 11March 2006 demonstrates this attitude very concisely.
The article starts with a valuable and probably valid critique of John Bolton. “[H]e has lived up to his reputation as a "loose cannon" that represents neither the American people nor the values espoused in the UN Charter.” Probably true.
It then goes further to provide a politically motivated link of dubious value to the widely recognized need of UN Reform and the much narrower concerns regarding John Bolton’s appointment: “Under the banner of "Reform", he has affected a number of changes that will forever alter the composition of the UN and eradicate its last vestiges of legitimacy. In a year or so the United Nations will be just another American NGO doing the leg-work for the multinational corporations. That’s good news for Bolton and his friends at the American Enterprise Institute, the ideological headquarters for America’s imperial incursions.” The author may have a point.
This quickly deteriorates to claims about John Bolton (and the New York Times) “carping about the fictitious "oil for food" scandal” and the opinion that “critique of UN failures reads like an extended passage from the "Rubaiyat"; great reading, but mostly hot air.” Really?
In order to promote the central tenant of his argument - that John Bolton was not a particularly intelligent appointment to the UN - with which many people, including myself, (and the US Congress) agree - the author also expects us to accept, without providing any supporting argument, that the considerable body of evidence of UN failures extending back several decades is mostly “hot air.”
This harks back to one Mark Malloch Brown – a man who either knows nothing of corruption or pretends not to know what it is - who dismissed all concerns of UN failures as insignificant affairs dreamed up by ignorant and ill informed “middle Americans;” likewise spoke of the “so-called” Oil-for-Food scandal and shamelessly promoted his own failure as UNDP Administrator as “the most dramatic internal transformation in the history of UNDP” by paying some fool half a million Dollars to write a book saying that this is so.(If UNDP “Reform” was really such a success, many people, including perhaps myself, would voluntarily have written books about it.)
It is vital that the “United Nations Transparency & Accountability Initiative” becomes and remains depolarised and divorced from internal American politics and the equally valid, but essentially separate, debate regarding the role of the United States as a member of the UN, and rest on a platform that impartially includes as many countries, organisations and concerned individuals as possible.
The United States mission to the UN should use its influence to break the complete silence regarding reform from other contributing countries to the UN and bring them aboard this initiative. Many of these countries are as democratic as the United States. They likewise use taxpayer money to fund the UN, but unlike the United States they are not nearly as wealthy and if anything, less capable of simply throwing money away. Countries that come to mind are Great Britain, Japan, Norway and the Netherlands (all major contributors to UN agencies through voluntary contributions.)
It is equally vital that the countries where the United Nations do most of its work and where the impact of corruption is felt the most acutely also come aboard. Given our young democracies, the social challenges of dealing with high unemployment and growing poverty levels and economic exclusion are major areas where the international community can play a role.
We want to see how the United Nations and its agencies interact with their own employees as well as with communities and how they address developmental impacts. In particular, we are interested in its overall investment in communities and if this is done in a sustainable manner. We are concerned about the moral and ethical considerations that the United Nations need to take into account. Central to all of this is how the United Nations can address negative social, economic and governance impacts in a sustainable and empowerment manner.
We also hope to empower governments in addressing the impacts of outside intervention and to empower local communities to play a more active engagement and monitoring role. The emphasis on upward accountability to donor administrations has demonstrated its serious limitations in terms of relevance as well as in its ability to detect (much less to correct) corruption.Strengthening the accountability toward intended beneficiaries is the most effective way of limiting corruption.
A very critical precondition for this accountability link to function is the empowerment of disadvantaged populations with regard to decisions on the use of resources. Taxpayers in donor countries can only achieve so much, and often it is very little.
At the same time, beneficiaries in recipient countries – especially where they are poor and marginalised populations – are almost by definition not well positioned to hold their own governments to account, and even less so donor governments and even less so arrogant and belligerent institutions such as UNDP.
Secondly, during the course of 2007 Ambassador Mark Wallace had written letters to a number of UN Agencies (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF) regarding the status of reforms. Even though he received encouraging responses it has to be taken into account that the UN is very good at producing positive documents and innovative guidelines. They are absolutely hopeless at implementing them. There are many reasons for this. It is possible to touch only very briefly on some of this here.
Any anti-corruption initiative should be concerned with institutional relational analysis alongside conventional activities analysis.
It should start from the assumption that management and donors will not voluntarily act in the interest of society, the environment or avoid benefiting at the expense of others. This initiative should challenge the common notion of what constitutes international responsibility and arrive at a new way of looking at how responsible management practices can contribute effectively to the values of the United Nations.
All policy interventions have their own limitations, and the fact that many UN operations still confuse social responsibility with philanthropy or hand outs, has resulted in numerous problems associated with omissions, deliberate cutting of corners, and overt and covert misrepresentations.
What is striking about UN reports is what the United Nations does not report on – the omissions in reporting on negative impacts, failed policies, inappropriate and outdated intervention philosophies and ignorance. Evaluations are paid for by donor agencies and in that sense are not independent. Evaluations undergo substantial revisions prior to being placed in the public domain. Beneficiaries themselves who may wish to determine that their views, complaints or suggestions have been recorded are typically not in a situation to access these documents.
While in some cases information exists and access is guaranteed, it is not always in a format that can be analyzed and that allows constructive and corrective action to be taken. Corruption thrives in environments where information is either too segmented or aggregated, is not comparable and prevents meaningful conclusions on financial resource utilization from being drawn. It is difficult, and often impossible, for a local community, NGO or public interest group to determine exactly what an UN intervention has been ‘programmed’ to do in a particular area, how decisions are made on investments and who gets paid how much to do what. The practical enactment of very high and important principles, or ethics, have no meaning other than when they are translated into action.
The United Nations do claim to have systems to help reinforce its values, to assist staff and organizations in meeting performance standards and to ensure that it works effectively and efficiently, but the systems are patchy and self-policed if policed at all.One of the biggest challenges to the International Community today is how to maintain an honest relationship with their clients when these number in the millions and when they seek to provide assistance in situations of chaos and fear.
There is a frightening lack of institutional learning in UN agencies. Rapid staff turnover, poor investment in training and little focus on knowledge management as a driving force for the organization mean that experience rests at best in a few long forgotten reports. Few systems for institutional learning seem to be functional. Improvement here is critical if UN agencies are to become innovative and able to balance local dynamics against global standards.
The overall knowledge base of the United Nations also needs expanding. Its work involves a huge range of skills, and an enormously diverse body of knowledge. In effect it draws upon many professions from medicine to engineering to law to political science. In the course of implementing programmes, any combination of these skills may be called upon. The United Nations has a tendency to elevate technical knowledge and skills around assistance almost to the exclusion of other bodies of knowledge, such as international law, human rights, developmental processes or disaster mitigation.A more complex understanding of rights and justice issues and the ability to articulate and operationalise these are essential.
The idealism of the United Nations is too often expressed in charitable notions or concerns to bolster up state failings. It should be people, and not states, that should take the centre stage. Of particular concern is the relationship that exists between UN agencies and regimes such as North Korea, Burma, and Syria.
The United Nations needs as in-depth an understanding of human rights and justice issues as it applies to individuals as they do of nutrition and food distribution.
Finally, the United Nations has never coherently expressed how their professionals and service-providers should relate to their clients - the victims of disaster, crisis and war. Are they accountable to them in the same way as a government is accountable to its citizens, or like a corporation is to its shareholders? Or, do they have a duty to inform them in the same way as a doctor or lawyer would do about a medical procedure or legal action? Does the United Nations demand a new form of accountability? A coherent and thorough answer to this question is perhaps the key to the future of the United Nations.
The true struggle for human rights, justice and democracy has to start with an understanding and commitment of those who suffer injustice, depravation and oppression. The principles of justice and democracy will not take root in Somalia, Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter, if it is propped up only by simplistic, outside intervention. If the United Nations truly want to make a difference then they have to attune their principles of independence and solidarity with the victims, even if this means accepting less cash from governments (and no cash at all from private and corporate donors), and dramatically toning down their catechistic rhetoric on successes which do not exist.
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