UN: Specialised Agencies

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, in this wide-ranging review of the UN agencies and I congratulate him on securing this short debate.

In the 60 years since the formation of the UN, we have come a long way, going much further than the original conception of forming an organisation for maintaining peace and security through mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. The specialised agencies, numerous as they are, have come about as Governments have realised that some of the most pressing problems of the world are not capable of resolution through the exercise of bilateral co-operation alone.

Winston Churchill saw that in his advocacy of concentric circles, which included the countries of empire, the alliances of Europe and the strategic north Atlantic interest that the UK was dependent upon after the war. So pooling sovereignty to the extent that we have in multilateral organisations is not something new. Yet in the UK, a founding member of the UN, it is becoming increasingly fashionable to knock the UN and its agencies except when we need them. At that point, the same people lament their inability to do whatever we want them to do at that particular time.

I welcomed the Government’s multilateral aid review earlier this year as an extremely useful exercise in evaluating our relationship with the UN specialised agencies and in taking forward a new approach. I want to make just three broad points in relation to these bodies.

The first is that while an individual member Government can do well to review the effectiveness of an international organisation—and I want to put it on the record that I think the multilateral aid review did an excellent job—it nevertheless brings to that exercise a narrow prism of sight, hence the review was commissioned to assess the value for money of UK aid funding for those organisations. I accept that the criteria related to strong behaviours which are capable of measurement—in this case, organisational strengths and contributions to UK development objectives—are entirely worth while. Any keen observer of UN agencies will not have been surprised to see that the list contained few surprises, and those that performed poorly or were merely adequate were those that had had a poor track record for some time. It was also not particularly surprising to see that they shared some similarities in weaknesses: a lack of a sharp focus on their mandate; an overly bureaucratic administration, which caused delays; inefficiencies built into the system; poor cost controls; and references to poor leadership and thereby, implicitly, to poor governance.

They are all areas which, were they to be found in corporate life or indeed in government, could be resolved through process and management change. However, the very essence of multilateralism—of being beholden to multiple stakeholders—makes consensus on change an extremely challenging task. Most countries can agree on what they think is wrong, but it is far more difficult to agree on what they think they want from that organisation going forward.

I refer back to my own experience at the Commonwealth Secretariat where we were constantly being pushed in one direction by a particular group of countries, and in another direction by another group. I think it is fair to say that when one thinks of the failure of the Commonwealth to resolve the political situation in Zimbabwe, it was not a failing on the part of the organisation but the lack of consensus on the part of its key members to be able to see a way forward which prevented effective action at the time. I use this example to suggest to our Government that achieving change in the direction we seek will be more easily delivered if we work across the other groups of stakeholders in a diplomatic and consensus-building fashion—sotto voce rather than megaphone diplomacy.

My second point is related and concerns the more practical aspects of cost controls and building efficient and transparent systems. There is a crying need for reorganisation of the governance of these bodies if they are to carry out their mandates. Some have overly cumbersome executive boards, overstaffed senior levels that have been in post too long, and a general risk aversion, which makes new learning more difficult. While we want lean and efficient structures, we the member countries do not accept that a quota system of recruitment actually works against the most high-calibre candidates.

If one is to take leadership changes at the IMF or World Bank, it is not an edifying spectacle in a global economic crisis to see a jockeying for position for the top job, not on the basis of merit but on the basis of whose turn it is. It also leaves the population of countries that do not “win” that post with the impression that the officeholder will from now on be partisan. This cannot possibly encourage confidence in those bodies. On the board, Buggins’s turn results in compositions that may not be fit for purpose. At executive level, the need for geographical balance may well deliver a less than optimal workforce. I urge like-minded countries to work with the Secretary-General and director-general to streamline board and human resource practices to reflect a stronger emphasis on merit, to the exclusion, if need be, of the requirement for geographical balance if the case is strong enough.

A further point is about the location and mandate of UN agencies. A good example of a body stifled from birth is that of UNEP. By basing it in Nairobi, it was hampered from the outset by the fact that it was cut off from the rest of the UN system geographically, and it struggled to recruit the highest calibre staff. In keeping with a somewhat lower status as a UN programme, it has had one of the smallest budgets within the system. Given that it is expected to look after a range of environmental issues, from climate change to biodiversity, water and ozone depletion, it is overstretched and underresourced. Given those constraints, it does a remarkably good job.

Let me turn now to one of the priority areas identified by the MAR—that of programmes supporting the empowerment of women and girls. Last year saw the creation of UN Women. Its full title is the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The reason it is an entity, we are told, is because its mandate is cross-cutting across other UN bodies to cover all themes related to women. It has strong leadership in the appointment of its first head, Michelle Bachelet. Its mandate is wide-reaching, so it was a little surprising to see that Saudi Arabia, that leading example of gender equality and empowerment, was voted on to the executive board. It came in in an obscure category of,

“developing country not on the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD”.

It stretches the imagination to think of Saudi Arabia in the context of gender equality but it also stretches the imagination to see it as a developing country. I wonder why it is in the G20 in that case.

I know that my noble friend will be prevented from commenting on this aspect of less than good governance because of diplomatic protocol, but I raise it to illustrate how we the member countries need to build smart alliances with other like-minded players to prevent perverse outcomes which simply heap ridicule on bodies which have important roles.

The UN agencies operate in challenging environments and perhaps our expectations of them are too high. However, as the multilateral aid review points out, it is our obligation to secure the best possible outcome for UK taxpayers and we must continue to press for our reform priorities if we are to maintain public confidence in the UN system, which it benefits us to do.