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The John W. Holmes lecture: can the UN be reformed?

Article Excerpt
UN secretaries-general 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 thirty-eighth-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 for reform. He introduced three major waves of measures: at the beginning of his term; when he was reelected 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 the UN Development Programme (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 with the organization's capacity to get results. People wanted more from the UN. Unable to deliver, the managers kept on trying to fix the machine. It became an occupational obsession.

This was true 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 gave 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: was this just about politics? Were the proposals we made, after Paul Volcker's investigation into the scandal, an attempt to deflect the allegations of wrongdoing by changing the conversation and talking about reforms, or were they a serious effort to fix something? The US 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 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 revenues appeared to have been directed honestly toward Iraq's immediate needs, which was the purpose of the program. The real corruption, to a fair-minded reader of the Volcker reports, was not that of the UN. The corruption was between companies that 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. The UN's fault lay elsewhere. It was not corrupt but incompetent. Its failures were supervisory and operational. There was inadequate auditing and in many cases little to no attempt to rectify the faults that were found in audit. The muddled lines of responsibility and accountability went all the way to the top.

For me, at UNDP, the disappointment was the way the Oil-for-Food Programme 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. Arcane administrative rules required UNDP to find another UN entity to actually implement operationally our program in Iraq. As a result, UNDP was using--to rehabilitate the electricity system in the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq--a UN Secretariat department whose traditional work was drafting reports and servicing conferences. 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 schoolchildren and their teachers got by in the meantime is not clear.

For a manager...

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