1. The fourth meeting in the series was entitled Ahead
of the Curve: Why the UN needs the capacity to think.
This meeting was chaired by Tony Colman MP, Chair
of All Party Parliamentary Group on the UN; and the
speakers were Professor Sir Richard Jolly and Professor
John Toye.
2. Richard Jolly began by identifying a number
of myths about the UN (presentation
notes). These were that:
i. The UN was mostly about peace-keeping and humanitarian action.
This was patently not true. 80% of its activities were in development.
ii. UN work was of low quality, bland and uncritical of developing
countries. Again, the evidence contradicted this view. Ten Nobel
prize winners in economics had worked with the UN, and much
of its work had been highly critical. By contrast, only one
Nobel prize winner (Joe Stiglitz) had been employed by the Bretton
Woods Institutions.
iii. The UN was an over-paid bureaucracy of paper-pushers. Again,
this needed to be challenged: in agencies like UNDP and UNICEF,
more than 80% of the staff now worked in developing countries.
Furthermore, pay in the UN was usually 20-30% below that in,
say, the IMF or the World Bank.
iv. The UN was resistant to reform. In this case, it was possible
to identify six major reform processes since 1945. Often, the
Secretariat was more enthusiastic on reform than the member
governments. This had been evident, for example, in Kofi Anan's
Track 1 reforms.
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3. Continuing in this theme, Richard Jolly
noted that the UN was consistently under-funded. In
the words of Margaret Anstee, it had been "starved
into reform". For example, the budget of the ILO
was 15% less than twenty years ago.
4. Richard Jolly then turned to the UN History Project
(more details of which can be found at www.unhistory.org).
He described the process and the publications planned,
and cited a number of important areas in which UN
thinking had led the world. These included work on
governance, the balance between the public and private
sectors, technology, land reform, national accounts,
and the use of development goals. He noted that UN
ideas had often been greeted with suspicion by the
Bretton Woods Institutions and the developed countries.
These included work on disarmament and human rights.
5. Summarising his argument, Richard Jolly identified five
reasons why the UN needed the capacity to think. These were:
i. The UN had over many years demonstrated its capacity
in this area.
ii. In particular, UN work had been multi-disciplinary,
with a high level of field involvement, reflective of developing
country voices and pragmatic in its approach.
iii. UN research had both legitimacy and credibility vis-à-vis
developing countries.
iv. The UN had the capacity to promote good research through
its outreach programmes, for example, the UNICEF State of
the World's Children Report and the UNDP Human Development
Report.
v. Competition in ideas was vital.
6. John Toye spoke to a presentation.
His key question was about the comparative advantage in research
of international organisations, especially given rapid changes
in supply conditions. Was research by international organisations
still needed in a world in which there was a much greater
volume of academic work, in both developed and developing
countries, and in which the private sector was also active?
7. Answering his own question, John Toye made the point that
knowledge was a public good, so it could be expected that
it would be under-supplied by the private sector. However,
it was important to make the point that public subsidy for
the production of knowledge did not necessarily require public
production of knowledge. It might equally be possible to subsidise
knowledge work in the academic sector and by private organisations.
8. There were some reasons why international organisations
(including the UN, but also the Bretton Woods Institutions)
should undertake research. These included the possibility
of relevance to current agendas, the likelihood of finding
champions for research findings within development administrations,
and the scope for improved performance by international organisations
themselves.
9. On the other hand, John Toye's research also showed that
there were dangers: that research would be funded by organisations
with doctrines to defend, who would therefore not be objective
in commissioning and using research; that managers would impose
organisational goals on research; that it was hard to spark
new ideas in big organisations, but easy to suppress good
ideas; and finally, that research in large organisations often
lacked originality and was highly self-referential. John Toye
emphasised that these were not hypothetical dangers, but real
problems he had observed in his research for the UN History
Project.
10. Nevertheless, it was certainly true that UN staff had
had radical ideas, and that these had seen the light of day,
especially during the Cold War period. The process had benefited
from rather lax editorial control, and had been of benefit
to poor countries. He cited Singer's work on defining terms
of trade, work by Prebisch on both the opportunities and limits
to import substituting industrialisation, research by Kalecki
on food supply as a constraint to growth, among other examples.
11. John Toye reached four main conclusions:
i. We should be aware of advocacy disguised as research.
ii. It seemed to be the case that developed countries would
mainly fund research by organisations they controlled (like
the OECD or the Bretton Woods Institutions).
iii. That developing countries had tried to use the UN, but
really needed their own research organisations.
iv. UN research worked best when it was carried out in organisations
that were protected from institutional interference, for example
in UNRISD (the UN Research Institute for Social Development)
or WIDER (the World Institute for Development Economics Research).
12. A number of points were made in the discussion:
In addition to UNRISD and WIDER, other UN organisations
carrying out research in semi-protected environments
included ECA and UNU. There was, however, sometimes
a problem in ensuring that the policy messages from
research in all the semi-protected institutions
was heard.
There was a discussion about the market place
for ideas and the importance of ensuring quality,
for example through normal peer review processes.
13. Other points included a discussion about the
source of the 0.7% aid target and about evidence
of the relative effectiveness of the UN.
