Abstract

Reform of the United Nations system organizations inevitably focuses on the staff of its secretariats are their main assets. Many proposals discount the value of the international public service. I argue that we need to take a close look at the role of the career international public service in delivering global services in the 21^st century. This involves connecting the good aspects of a Weberian civil service with results-based management, learning from what is good in the first 62 years of the international civil service and projecting this into the current century by answering with good data questions about recruitment, performance, career and training. I propose an urgent exercise of research and reflection on the role and functioning of the international public service.

At the 62^nd General Assembly in the autumn of 2007, where reform of the organization is a major issue, two ideas have converged about the staff of the United Nations System. Ban Ki Moon, in his first report on the Organization[1] stated

4. When it comes to the reform of the Organization, we will need to be ambitious while at the same time focused and disciplined. We will also need to maximize the tremendous potential of our biggest asset -a diverse and dedicated staff. To fully leverage this key asset, we must build a staff that is truly mobile, multifunctional and accountable, with more emphasis on career development and training. And it means holding all United Nations employees to the highest standards of integrity and ethical behaviour, both at Headquarters and in the field.

At the same time, four countries (Chile, South Africa, Sweden and Thailand), under the Four Nations Initiative in Towards a Compact: Proposals for Improved Governance and Management of the United Nations Secretariat made a proposal (number 28)[2]

… that ways and means be devised for the UN, as a knowledge-based organization, to develop long-term visions for human resource issues as a whole.

In explaining this, the report stated

Such a vision should look at what a future international civil service should encompass, taking into account all the demands and complexities of the UN in the 21st century. A vision should be informed by experience and good practice of other large knowledge-based organizations. At the same time it must be based on the UN Charter and the international character of the UN. It is important that the principles of transparency and accountability are maintained, as well as the proper division of responsibility between Member States and the Secretariat. The formulation of such a vision should take into account the unique nature of the Organization and should not compete with ongoing efforts of reform in the field of human resources. It would be complementary, facilitating the long-term direction of efforts for improvement.

The international civil service is one of the main institutional innovations of the 20^th century, really only starting with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization.[3] There has been a clear evolution in tasks and status as well as significant growth. At the same time, the international civil service has not been immune to the criticisms leveled at national civil services. In a sense, with their rules, permanent contracts and hierarchical structures, they seem out of date in a world that seems to believe in business models, cost-effectiveness, flexibility and out-sourcing as the ideal for organizations. International civil service is, if a Western teenager was to be asked, “so twentieth century.”

A conceptual basis for the international civil service derives from Max Weber, the 19^th Century sociologist who formulated the concept of bureaucracy and bureaucratic authority. While he was describing the emergence of the modern German state based on administrations that followed rules and were neutral within their context, we are looking not at a state but something unique and 20^th Century: a public authority that is not sovereign but still delivers trans-territorial services.

The international public sector, unlike the national, lacks most of the attributes of state power: it has no armies, collects no taxes, and imposes no fines. What it does is exercise functions given it by states that preserve international order, without which States themselves would not function except at great cost. The authority of the international public sector is based on legitimate power that states accept because they perceive that it is right to do so. But it can only be legitimate if those who exercise that authority are themselves perceived as legitimate.

It follows that the effectiveness of the international public sector will depend on the effectiveness of the work of the servants who run it. This is why reform of the international civil service is linked with results-based management.

There is no doubt that the international civil service is growing. According to Chief Executive Board figures, the number of staff in the UN system increased 135 percent between 1986 and 2005. This was a 12 percent growth per year. Constrained by zero growth budgets, the staff funded from the assessed budgets was only steady.^[4] However, if we assume an average growth of 12 percent per year, we can expect, in 2020, a UN System staff of 317,401 persons.

There is also no doubt that the international civil service is renewing itself. With growth, the proportion of the civil service that is new has also grown.

In 1997, a third of the UN Secretariat staff had been there for less than five years; in 2005, it was half. In 1997, a fifth of the staff had 20 years or more service; in 2005, the figure was 14 percent. Given that most of the long-timers are over fifty-five (amounting to 20 percent of the staff), we will have a major generational shift very quickly. This is a problem noted by the Joint Inspection Unit in 2007[5], which recommended that the age issue should be systematically examined, including recruitment of younger professionals and an upward revision of the retirement age.

The main growth has been in posts funded from extra-budgetary funds or from peacekeeping budgets. This includes posts in regular programs like drugs and crime, human rights and the environment as well as humanitarian program like refugees where extra-budgetary posts were usual. Fully 62 percent of UN Secretariat staff was in peacekeeping mission, tribunals or other field posts in 2007.[6] Only half of the Secretariat staff is on stable (series 100) contracts. Over 5000 staff members (15 percent) are on contracts of less than one year that do not give full employment benefits. While all are part of the international public service, they are not members on an equal basis.

For staff against established posts, there is a perception that the international civil service is static and immobile. As a result, the Secretary-General has implemented new mandatory mobility policies. The official logic is “This new reality of the United Nations requires a workforce capable of fulfilling both the standing requirements of headquarters programmes and the mandates of field activities. The mobility of staff is essential in order to create such a workforce.”[7] In commenting on the policy, the Joint Inspection Unit noted that “While recognizing that staff mobility is a crucial element in effective human resources management and that the Organization is evidently in need of an enhanced mobility system, the Inspectors firmly believe that other considerations should also be pondered, in particular, the need for specialized staff, the preservation of institutional memory, and the costs involved.”[8]

In addition, there is a perception that the international civil service is becoming incompetent. This was reflected in Investing in the United Nations,[9] in which Kofi Annan made proposals about the staff of the secretariat and said,

My vision is of an independent international civil service which will once again be known for its high standards of ethics, fairness, transparency and accountability, as well as its culture of continuous learning, high performance and managerial excellence.

The implication is that the quality of the international civil service had deteriorated and need reforms to restore itself to its former position.

One common factor of most analyses of the international public service is the lack of real data on the current situation as well as the history of the international public service. Most proposals, including many in Investing in the United Nations have been made based on assumptions rather than facts. There has been little interest in the academic community in examining the minutiae of human resources, program planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation in the secretariats of the United Nations system. Most internal studies, other than those of the JIU, have not been published.

Nor have the implications of the changing role of the international public service really been explored, except rhetorically. Clearly an international model drawn from the notion of a static national civil service based on established posts, unchanging tasks and slow but steady advancement up the ranks that was satirized for the British civil service in the BBC series “Yes, Minister” no longer applies. But how much of that model is still necessary to maintain the credibility of the international public sector needs to be examined, as well as the kinds of changes that will equip it for new contexts in which services have to be provided by international officials.

I would like to propose some considerations that should be taken into account in addressing the lack of information and the implications of change.

As a basic principle, we should expand the principles set out for international public service in the UN Charter. Its Article 101 lays down three well-known criteria for the international civil service: the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity. There is a missing criterion: effectiveness. To be fair the question should be whether an efficient secretariat that was ineffective would be better than an inefficient but effective one? Effectiveness requires both competence and integrity. The basis for Secretariat authority is that it is legitimate and it is legitimate if it is believed to be competent, have integrity and is effective.

So how to we obtain an efficient, competent, integrity-based effective international public service?

First, we have to look at recruitment practices. One of the most effective means that I saw during my career has been the use of competitive examinations at the entry-level. This innovation was made for the United Nations Secretariat in the mid-1970’s after JIU Inspector Maurice Bertrand did a study of entry-level positions and found that they had the highest average age of all types of posts, because the grade was being used to promote general service staff on the verge of retirement. His solution was to make entry-level posts available only through the examination process. However, the long-term consequences of this have not been studied empirically and should be, since the examination method has not been picked up by any of the other organizations of the United Nations system.

Second, we have to look at how staff performance is assessed. There is supposed to be a connection between organizational program performance as part of results-based management and individual performance. The old methods of individual performance assessment do not work well but new methods have not been examined carefully, even though there are many experiments in the Specialized Agencies.

Third, contractual arrangements for staff are becoming both more complicated and less fair. When the international civil service was established, there was only one series of contracts but there are now at least three and many staff are on contracts of less than a year. The grade and contractual structure needs to be reviewed in the light of the types of persons who need to be employed.

Fourth, the issue of permanent contracts needs to be revisited in the context of what “career” means for the international public service. Permanent contracts went out of favor because it was perceived that they produced ineffective, change-resistant time-servers in the civil service. Whether they really did so was never evaluated and the experience of those organizations that had formal policies in favor of staff rotation was never compared with those that built permanent contracts into the system. The issue should be framed in terms of those functions whose long-term success depends on having a career public service and those that benefit from turnover. This needs to be seen in the larger context of what types of careers international public servants should expect.

Fifth, we need to determine how to instill the values of international public service in new (and even old) staff members. This implies that we know what these values are, which is an exercise in itself, but clearly one element is an appraisal of what was good about the values held by the first generations of international public servants. I tried to document some of this in my recent book, Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics.[10] This can be done by case studies, exit interviews with career staff who are leaving and by review of studies of effective actions by the international public sector.

How to do this? I propose that the Secretary-General, as Chair of the Chief Executive Board of the United Nations System, convene an exercise of reflection on the future of the international public service. The exercise should engage existing staff of the organizations of the United Nations system, retirees, academic scholars and representatives of Member States. It should be done quickly before reform proposals based on impressions or even bad data lead to results that, in effect, throw the baby (the international public service) out with the bathwater (reform).

Biographical sketch

John Mathiason is Professor of International Relations at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He was a career staff member of the United Nations Secretariat from 1971-1997 and since has consulted widely with organizations of the United Nations System in results-based management. He authored Invisible Governance: International Secretariats in Global Politics (Kumarian, 2007) and was co-author of Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction: Prospects for Effective International Verification (Palgrave, 2005)

[1] This is a revised version of a presentation made to the Wilton Park Conference on Creating an International Public Service for the 21^st Century, July 17, 2007.