When I return to Washington, and when other permanent representatives return to their capitals, we want to be able to report to our taxpayers that the UN has entered a new era and that governments can be confident that the resources they invest will be used wisely.
—Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN
Reform is a loaded word, especially in the UN. The call for making improvements may imply that better things are coming, but it also raises the prospect that some people or groups may lose privileges or coveted status. “In theory,” observes Edward Luck, “all the member states want reform; in practice they all mean very different things by it. So it’s very hard to get a consensus among the members for change in the organization.” He adds that “the big powers are afraid that they’ll lose some degree of control; the small powers are afraid that whatever pledges they’ve received regarding the bureaucracy will be lost in a more sweeping reform controlled by the bigger powers and bigger contributors.” Predictably, when Ban Ki-moon became secretary-general in 2007 and presented his ideas for reform, they met resistance from many directions.
Speaking broadly, the calls for reform fall into two categories: a more up-to-date alignment of status and authority and better management of the system. Security Council restructuring, considered in chapter 6, represents the push for a realignment of status and authority. The management aspect of reform , which is less overtly political and philosophical in nature, is a favorite topic among Western analysts and politicians, who believe that the UN system could be much more effective, efficient, and accountable than it is. The most outspoken proponents of reform have usually come from the large donor nations, which say they want to make the organization better.
When Kofi Annan took office in 1997, he launched what he called his “quiet revolution” to streamline the organization and make it both more efficient and more effective without raising costs. The quiet revolution managed to stop the Secretariat’s budget creep for a few years, beginning in 1998, and even reduced it a little. Although the UN claimed that the total number of all staff in the UN system (about fifty-two thousand) was much smaller than the number of employees at many large corporations, it nevertheless tried to keep staff numbers from growing too fast. Former UN ambassador Nancy Soderberg thinks that Annan tossed out a lot of the dead wood. “I would say that 90 percent are terrific. You have the young people who are very enthused about it and the senior people who have worked their life in the UN and loved it, and then you have a few people scattered around who are there for life.”
Mark Malloch-Brown makes a different criticism of the bureaucracy, citing a pervasive “disconnect between merit and reward.” It’s “rational,” he notes, “that if you work hard and do well, you get promoted, and if you don’t work hard you don’t. In parts of the UN that doesn’t happen.” He advocates “reconnecting merit to make the UN again an international meritocracy.” To do this, however, Malloch-Brown believes that the UN must stop advancing its personnel on the basis of political correctness, which encourages promoting staff disproportionately from certain regions of the world. Asia, Africa, and other so-called less developed regions now offer a large pool of talented, skilled, and highly motivated professionals, which, in his view, the UN ought to make more use of. These individuals are so highly qualified, he believes, that they will readily move up through the UN system without need of the “cultural relativism which is used to promote incompetents.”
A related point is often made by UN member states from the developing world who complain that some of the most desirable senior posts within the Secretariat are filled under a “tradition” of regional representation that favors the United States and other affluent nations. The point has been made forcefully by former ambassador Munir Akram of Pakistan, who was once head of the G-77. “The major countries, the major powers, hold very high positions in the Secretariat and support their national interests and refuse to allow the secretary-general to cut departments,” he claims. And when they do ask for budget cuts, they do it “where it does not affect their national interests.” He labels this “a double standard which is applied or is thought to be applied in the Secretariat, and we as overseers of the G-77 do not accept this double standard.”
Malloch-Brown comments on the importance of UN agencies and departments being able to cooperate smoothly with one another. He “saw very clearly how the system doesn’t really want to allow that to happen.” He found the General Assembly suspicious that the secretary-general was “ceding certain management responsibilities to a Western deputy”—Malloch-Brown, when he was deputy secretary-general—and yet “the powers were those which in any corporate setting would be seen as the powers not of a chief executive but of a chief operating officer.” The division of responsibility was necessary and reasonable, says Malloch-Brown, “unless you assume a secretary-general is to do everything, from turning off the lights at night to signing off on payroll every month.”
One of the UN’s first substantive efforts to address criticism of its administration came in 1994 with the establishment of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), charged with making the bureaucracy more effective and efficient. Creation of the office pleased the US government, which described it as “one of the most significant management reforms adopted by the General Assembly in many years.” The Secretariat gained a new reform tool in December 2000, when the General Assembly authorized it to start “results-based budgeting.” Long urged by the United States as a way of rationalizing the allocation and spending of funds, results-based budgeting establishes objectives for each department or program and develops “performance indicators” to measure progress in reaching them.
Many observers credit Annan’s quiet revolution with making real improvements. It was pushed along by the Procurement Task Force, established in January 2006, largely at the urging of the under-secretary-general for management at the time, Christopher Burnham. The task force was charged with looking for corruption and abuse and providing information for prosecutors. Burnham, a former official in the US State Department, was appointed in May 2005 and left the UN in fall 2006. During his brief but energetic tenure he pushed for the creation of a UN Ethics Office, which officially opened in 2007. He is also credited with establishing a whistle-blower protection policy for UN staff; introducing international public-sector accounting standards for the UN; and modernizing the UN’s information and communication technology infrastructure.
Esther Brimmer of George Washington University sees reform succeeding in some parts of the system, like the UNDP (more transparency), but she complains that the information technology is “woefully behind” and that the standardization of budgeting across the system is “only fair.” Similarly, reports by a respected US government body, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), usually give mixed reviews of UN reform efforts. They often speak of progress in various aspects of the UN’s operations, from the practice of professional ethics to oversight and efficient management, but the favorable comments are invariably tempered by warnings that the pace of change is often too slow, owing to various factors, including a lack of interest by many member states. A GAO report in 2011 noted progress in improving the effectiveness of the UN’s internal oversight body but also identified key areas of weakness, such as understaffing and insufficient audit authority, and called for further action.
The experiences of Malloch-Brown and other insiders suggest that UN staff must operate in a highly politicized environment, where the Security Council and the General Assembly, which make the rules, can ignore them if they so choose. UN analyst Shepard Forman criticizes the UN precisely on this point: unlike the US government, he argues, “the UN doesn’t have an effective system of checks and balances.” Budgets, for example, may be treated as entitlements rather than limits to spending and in that way become vulnerable to uncontrollable growth.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks during an informal thematic debate on management reform at the General Assembly, April 8, 2008. UN Photo / Paulo Filgueiras.
US Permanent Representative Samantha Power referred to the arbitrariness of the budgeting arrangements in December 2013, when she spoke at the General Assembly’s Fifth Committee, the one that shapes the biennial budget. “Under the leadership of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,” she began, “the UN has taken some important steps to improve the organization’s relevance and performance. Over the past two years the Secretariat has operated within its budget allocation for special political missions; that is a laudable break from the past, and one that my government commends.” Unfortunately, she continued, in the proposed budget for 2014–15, “promises of future change are simply not enough.”
Power reviewed recent history to make her point. “Recall that two years ago, we approved a budget based on the understanding that if some costs exceeded expectations, others would be reduced to keep the overall level roughly the same. This pledge has not been kept.” Instead, after approval of the budget “we have already agreed to two separate additions, totaling $200 million for recosting, and we have funded add-ons made necessary by new mandates, such as special political missions in Yemen and the Sahel.” And that was not the end of the additions, for “the current report seeks an additional $160 million in recosting costs above and beyond the approved budget.” She admonished her audience, pointing out that “such a request is not typical of how most businesses and organizations function.”
The problem, Power continued, is that “we are essentially budgeting by looking backward, saying the UN budget is what we spent, rather than saying a UN budget is the envelope defining what we have available to spend.” The solution is to realize that something can be done about it. “There is an unfortunate tendency to act as if none of these cost increases are within our control—that it is all the result of methodologies that are written in stone and that cannot be altered or countered. The truth is that each of these increases and these methodologies is the product of choice. And what we have the power to choose, we do have the ability to work together to change.” At the conclusion of her remarks Power reminded the committee members that in the final analysis the UN budgets depend on the willingness of the more affluent nations to pay the greater part of the organization’s expenses.
Undoubtedly, many members of the US Congress would agree with her assessment and her suggestions for improvement, but the question remains whether the UN can actually reform its corporate culture, which is more bureaucratic than entrepreneurial and ill-suited to the kind of dispassionate self-examination and self-discipline that Power seeks. Reform is possible at the UN, as Burnham’s efforts show, but within limits, as Malloch-Brown’s experience demonstrates. Malloch-Brown admits that progress on reform “is generally quite low.” He explains: “My problem always is, the demands on the UN grow exponentially; the rate of reform is a much lower trend line. It’s a gentle uphill move, whereas the demands on the UN rise vertically, so the gap between expectations and performance continues to grow.”