Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development

Stephen Browne, Thomas G Weiss, Stephen Browne, Thomas G Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367186852
• eBook ISBN: 9780429588693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

International commissions, academics, practitioners, and the media have long been critical of the UN's development efforts as disjointed and not fit for purpose; yet the organization has been an essential contributor to progress and peacebuilding.

This handbook explores the activities of the UN development system (UNDS), the largest operational pillar of the organization and arguably the arena in which its ideational endeavors have made the biggest contribution to thinking and standards. Contributions focus on the role of the UNDS in sustainable social, economic, and environmental development, describing how the UNDS interacts with the other major functions of the UN system, and how it performs operationally in the context of the new 2030 development agenda focused on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The volume is divided into three sections:

• Realizing the SDGs: opportunities and challenges;

• Resources, partnerships, and management; and

• Imagining the future of the UN in development.

Comprised of chapters by knowledgeable and authoritative UN experts, this book provides cutting-edge and up-to-date research on the strengths and weaknesses of the UNDS, with each chapter focusing on different operational and ideational aspects.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I

Realizing the SDGs

Opportunities and challenges

1

THE UN DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM

Origins, structure, status

Stephen Browne and Thomas G. Weiss

This first chapter describes where the complex “family” of UN development organizations came from, how it has evolved, and the different functions that it performs. Ideas and operations, the UN’s two main outputs, appear throughout and provide the background for the subsequent pages in this Handbook.

The first new organizations

The League of Nations was dissolved in 1946, overlapping the creation of the UN by one year. At the final session of the League’s Assembly, one of its founders and ardent defenders, Lord Robert Cecil, uttered his memorable sound bite: “The League of Nations is dead; long live the United Nations.”¹ It is striking how many of the supposedly discredited ideas associated with the defunct League reappeared.² Leland Goodrich, a member of the US delegation, explained:

Quite clearly there was a hesitancy in many quarters to call attention to the continuity of the old League and the new United Nations for fear of arousing latent hostilities or creating doubts which might seriously jeopardize the birth and early success of the new organization.³

In the development domain especially, the UN could trace its pedigree to the League, which had been preoccupied with the importance of economic, social, and financial cooperation from the 1930s.⁴ The influential 1939 report from the former Australian prime minister Stanley Bruce⁵ proposed the creation of a Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions, anticipating the creation a few years later of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The League committee was never created as envisaged, but the Economic and Financial Organization (EFO) continued to discuss the virtues of an “ECOSOC” even after the EFO migrated from its Geneva base to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University. Its new home reflected the continuing interest of the United States in this aspect of the League’s work, even though it was not a member. The interest would translate subsequently into a firm US commitment to development in the UN.

The EFO reflected thinking from David Mitrany, a historian and political theorist who had worked for the League and who had written about the “functionalist” approach to international relations.⁶ He maintained that international cooperation should concentrate on issues that unite people, keeping the technical separate from the political. Functionalism could be the basis of solutions to international problems faced by the post-war world and also the building blocks for more ambitious multilateralism, or “peace by pieces.”

US president Franklin D. Roosevelt himself took a cooperative functionalist approach in calling for international conferences among countries of the new world organization, building upon the “Declaration by United Nations,” signed in Washington, DC by 26 (later 44) Allies on 1 January 1942. These conferences led to the establishment of the first of the new agencies. In May 1943, a meeting in Hot Springs, Virginia on cooperation in food security and nutrition led to the creation of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Later in the same year, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was set up to meet the immediate humanitarian needs resulting from the war. The following year saw the convening of the UN Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which conceived the creation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, later the World Bank), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Trade Organization (ITO). The IBRD and IMF became “specialized agencies” of the UN in name only; they were physically, ideologically, financially, and organizationally distanced from the system. The need for an international organization with the full UN membership governing world trade grew with time. However, the ITO was stillborn because of opposition from the US Congress, which thereby compromised the original vision of the UK’s John Maynard Keynes for a triumvirate of economic governance organizations. In its place was a 1948 UN treaty, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was mainly focused on facilitating industrial trade among developed countries; only much later, in 1995, was the World Trade Organization (WTO) born.

More conferences followed, concluding with agreements to establish the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which opened their doors in 1946 and 1947, respectively, followed in 1948 by the World Health Organization (WHO). These creations were not the first of the UN’s specialized agencies. The Treaty of Versailles had created the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919. When it met in Philadelphia in 1944, the United States supported its inclusion in the UN as long as its autonomy was preserved.

In the summer of 1944 at a conference in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Republic of China deliberated for seven weeks in order to agree on the design of the future UN. These so-called Washington conversations, chaired by the United States, agreed to several key features of the future world organization, including the principle of the veto for the permanent members of the future Security Council and to the establishment of ECOSOC. The latter’s role was to prove crucial for the future UN development system (UNDS). The League’s proposed Central Committee was to have had powers to “direct and supervise” the organizations under its aegis. But the authority of the future ECOSOC was watered down substantially. The UN’s formal Charter Article 62 was agreed at San Francisco in 1945; it called for the specialized agencies to be “brought into relationship” with the UN; it defined ECOSOC as an intergovernmental body that may only “coordinate the activities of the specialized agencies through consultation.”

This formulation had profound implications for an already structurally inchoate UNDS. On the positive side, the UN specialized agencies would enjoy the status and independence for their secretariats to attract the best specialists in their respective fields. On the negative side, their relative autonomy and the absence of an authoritative central overseer with financial leverage encouraged an ever-growing dispersion of interests and proliferation of overlapping mandates and operational duplication. From the UN’s earliest days, the need for coordination of the growing development family was evident. One of the first senior appointments to the secretariat was the assistant secretary-general for coordination, Robert Jackson. He received a 1948 letter from the first director-general of FAO and future Nobel laureate, Lord Boyd Orr: “I earnestly hope that you will be able to do what I have been clamouring for in the last two years—bring the heads of the specialized agencies together, and try to get a coordinated drive.”⁷ Subsequently, the proposals for ECOSOC’s reform and the need for an authoritative head of development have permeated the UNDS’s history, concerns that all chapters in this book address.

Constant growth

Besides the ILO, other pre-existing international organizations were inducted into the UN family. Its oldest member is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), founded under a slightly different name and for different technologies in 1865. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) was set up in 1874. In addition to the new post-war creations—FAO, UNESCO, ICAO, and WHO—a succession of additional specialized agencies came into being: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 1951), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, 1957), the International Maritime Organization (IMO, 1958), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, 1970), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD, 1977), the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO, 1985), and the most recent of all, the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2003). The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) existed in slightly different forms before becoming specialized agencies.

Under the auspices of the secretary-general and the UN secretariat, a steady accretion of additional “funds and programs” responded to emerging needs and donor preferences. The early priorities were for humanitarian relief. UNRRA concluded operations in 1947; some of its resources were distributed to the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (now the UN Children’s Fund, better known by the original acronym, UNICEF), which came into being in 1946.⁸ The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) followed in 1949, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1951, and the World Food Programme (WFP) in 1963—initially as a joint venture between the UN and FAO. UNWRA, UNHCR, and WFP came to form the core of the UN’s humanitarian action, jealously guarding their separate relief mandates. In 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) became part of the UN family. UNICEF is something of a hybrid. Established initially as a relief organization on a temporary basis, it soon took on additional development responsibilities on behalf of children and women and, with the largest field network of all, it has also played a central role in the UNDS.⁹

Most of the new funds and programs had a developmental vocation. Two UN funds for development assistance were established in the 1950s: the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA, 1950) and the Special Fund (1958), which merged in 1965 to form the UN Development Programme (UNDP). Other funds and programs included the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Trade Centre (ITC) (both 1964), the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA, 1969), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP, 1972), the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat, 1978), the UN Joint Programme for AIDS (UNAIDS, 1996), the Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 1997), and the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women, 2010).

All depended on voluntary funding; in most cases, richer member states authorized such in response to perceptions of emerging global needs. A sense of altruism drove the creation of the humanitarian agencies. In the development arena, there were more specific concerns. The creation of UNFPA was motivated by a desire on the part of some developed countries to roll back global population growth. UNEP was the product of rising environmental concerns following the first global UN conference in Stockholm on the subject in 1972; UN Habitat a response to rapid urban development and growing slums; UNAIDS to the growing HIV and AIDS pandemic; and UNODC, a continuation of the war against drugs and crime. The advent of UN Women in 2010 was, like UNDP and UNODC, the result of a merger; in this case, of four pre-existing entities. Combining UN organizations was a welcome but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: development, the largest of four UN functions
• Part I: Realizing the SDGs: opportunities and challenges
• Part II: Resources, partnerships, and management
• Part III: Imagining the future of the UN in development
• Index