Wolfowitz: more fuel for UN reform
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Horse-trading is back on the agenda at the United Nations with a number of top jobs coming up for grabs. Unfortunately, as has been shown in the appointment of successors to James Wolfensohn at the World Bank and to Carol Bellamy at the UN Childrens Fund (Unicef), suitability for the post appears to come well down the list of candidates qualifications.
Top and indeed only - qualification for the Bank job is US citizenship. One day perhaps Washington will relent and broaden the qualification to anyone acceptable to the US. But not yet: the job is too crucial to Washingtons policies around the world. Perhaps a start could have been made at Unicef, another American fiefdom. Carol Bellamy, the executive director, retires at the end of April. (She has been in the job 10 years, and UN policy stipulates a maximum of two five-year terms.) Activists could have attempted to stage a re-run of the attempt made in 2003 to open up the corridors and backrooms for the naming of the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO). As the London-based non-governmental organisation, Health Exchange, noted at the time: Is it an open process? Is there a way for WHO stakeholders to make their views heard? Is there even a way for those with an interest in the process to get to hear the views, the vision, the hopes, the dreams, the initial ideas of the candidates? The question, then as now, was purely rhetorical. No was the clear answer: Sadly, it is not an open and transparent process. And it is a process that is potentially at risk of being manipulated. It is also a process that excludes the views of many of the key players in global health with whom the new Director General will have to work. So a coalition of 300 NGOs hosted an international videoconference, broadcast around the world on the Net and via the WorldSpace satellite system. The experiment was funded by Exchange, the Geneva-based Forum for Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The aim was to provide a forum for the candidates for the director-generalship to outline their views and to be questioned by a public audience. In the event, only three candidates took part, and they did not include the man who finally got the job, Dr Jong Wook Lee. Afterwards, the Communications Initiative (advance the extent and quality of communication and change information) took an online poll on whether decisions on the leadership of international development agencies should include an election process involving the people most affected by the issues that a particular agency is seeking to address. For example, it mused, should children 10 to 18 vote for the next Unicef executive director and people living on less than $2 per day vote for the next World Bank president? Many people would dismiss such suggestions as absurd, but there are other, more realistic options. In 1996 a pamphlet by two UN insiders, Brian Urquhart and Erskine Childers, made sensible proposals for a new approach to leadership in the UN system*. These included
Urquhart and Childers proposals are not utopian or unrealistic. They themselves describe the suggestions as quite mundane, drawn from well-tested experience in a wide variety of institutions throughout the world. It bears repeating that the smallest academic institution or well-established corporation virtually anywhere in the world devotes more time, energy and systematic effort to searching for its executive than do governments for the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Such sentiments have been endorsed in the Commission for Africa report published in March. In referring to the top positions at the World Bank and IMF, it says: these opportunities involve jobs of great importance and should go to the best available person regardless of nationality. A better system of selection for top UN posts would benefit the UN and, by example, encourage transparency around the world. It would also help the successful candidates. Had Ann Veneman, Bellamys successor at Unicef, been shortlisted and questioned, with her answers made public, according to an established procedure, she would not have to spend months convincing staff, other agencies, governments and NGOs that her main qualification is that she is continuing an unbroken line of Americans at the helm of the agency since its founding in 1946. Similarly, a more open procedure would have meant that the howls of protest that greeted Paul Wolfowitzs nomination for the World Bank post could have been pre-empted by a more constructive debate about his views on world poverty and what he thinks the Bank could do about it. Better leadership of international organisations needs to begin with a better selection system for leaders. * A World in Need of Leadership: Tomorrows United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Uppsala, Sweden |
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