28 November 2023
This is our first wrap-up session. Its purpose is to discuss some basic principles of the main competences that are needed to manage internationally correctly. It will also look at how the international public sector is growing and changing in the light of the four problems of the apocalypse.
The last seventy-eight years have given more visibility and responsibility to international organizations. They have increased their tasks as the end of the Cold War removed whatever stability existed in that bipolar structure. Some organizations, like the IMF and the WTO even attracted something that international bureaucrats never believed their work would attract: street demonstrations. The government of the United States has had to recognize the need for the United Nations to manage many global problems that even a hegemon cannot handle and the Obama administration took on a definite multilateral orientation, although not one shared by the Republican Party. The accession of Donald Trump led to a retreat of that key State from multilateralism, but the Biden administration has undertaken to undo that retreat. The Glascow COP 26 was at least a partial return to the possibilities, although its results were mixed. The Sham al-Sheikh COP27 made more progress, but still not enough. A paper that I prepared to introduce a panel being organized for the 2009 International Studies Association Convention in February 2009 discusses some of these issues. My position on this has not changed much since then. Fortunately, the Biden administration is re-engaging the United States and in the meantime there are new major efforts to reform the UN System, reflected in Our Common Agenda, that was presented in August 2021 to the General Assembly by the UN Secretary-General and will lead to a summit on the future in 2023..
After all of these changes, there has been a sudden focus on management. Member States have become concerned that the organizations may be inefficient, or the contributions exacted from their legislatures might not be well-spent. Within the organizations, a fascination with management training has grown, partly to convince Member States that improvements are on the way, mostly because the senior managers sense that there is a real need to upgrade management skills if the organizations are to cope with their growing responsibilities. Results-based management may be the flavor of the decade (or two or three). A culture of evaluation is being developed in most international organizations. In organizations like WHO, whose importance has grown along with pandemics, there is now a Transformation Agenda whose main purpose is to make the organization more RBM compliant.
Added to this is the fact that a large percentage of the management level staff of most organizations, who have learned their trade through the apprenticeship of time, are leaving, are about to leave or have left. These are managers who grew up in a quieter time. One of their main skills was the ability to remain anonymous and one of their great assets was an understanding of the international system and their role in it. They were also perceived to be very “bureaucratic” as described by Shirley Hazzard in her novel People in Glass Houses. (Shirley Hazzard was a young Australian who was recruited to work as a secretary at the United Nations in the 1950’s. A gifted writer, she didn’t last long there and wrote a wry memoire of her time there. She later wrote a non-fiction book very critical of the organization in late Waldheim times entitled Defeat of an Ideal; A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations.)
Clearly, a completely Weberian bureaucracy would not be able to manage the new international tasks. But what, then, would be needed? Two organizations have found their answers (at least for now). Key or core competencies have to be created, developed and nurtured. These were usually divined by outside consultants, based on interviews with senior and middle managers. They are, however, reasonably accurate.
In the International Atomic Energy Agency, the following core competencies have been identified:
The United Nations Secretariat has identified three core values:
Eight core competencies:
It has identified six managerial competencies
It is probably a tribute to the United Nations that the list is longer (it probably took more to get a consensus), unbalanced (some elements could be considered a subset of others while others are probably less essential – e.g commitment to continuous learning) and, to a certain extent, unmeasurable (creativity, which I would have preferred to call innovativeness). There are some interesting differences with the IAEA which, like the engineers who are its main staff and clients, tends to be more direct and, dare I say, logical. The main one is that for the UN “vision” (or what George Bush, père, would have called “that vision thing”) is the competency, while for the Agency, it is “strategic thinking”.
My own view is that strategic thinking is the main managerial competency, since it implies a longer-term focus that is, nevertheless, practical. Vision without a cognitive capacity of translation can be unrealistic. The next most important, to me, is leadership, which I define as the ability to convince your colleagues to follow you. It is leadership by example and implies all of the other competencies. Because international managers have to interact with an incredibly complex internal and external environments is a key skill, not easy to develop through lectures or books. It is the kind of skill that requires time and experience, which is one reason why I favor a career system, particularly to develop managerial cadres.
In a seminal book, Politics and Markets, Charles Lindblom (the Yale economist) said that politics revolved around whether the State replaced the Market or the Market replaced the State. In international management, the State is probably the International Organization and the Market is the NGOs.
There is no doubt that NGO’s (now dignified as Civil Society) are increasing in importance and, as a result, their management becomes critical. But, as we have seen in the course, it is a different kind of management. The long-term vision often is sacrificed for the short-run need to raise funds. In some respects, an observation made in a paper by Marisela Canache, one of the participants in the 2000 edition of the course (and now in resource planning and administration senior specialist in the Inter-American Development Bank), is very relevant here:
The main obstacles
that I have found were, first, locating the organization to work with, and
later on, getting from the people inside it the information that I needed to
finish the analysis. In the first stage, I searched the web and checked many
sites trying to locate and organization that could have enough information
posted on the internet to make the analysis that was required but I found that
most of the information on the internet is incomplete for the purpose of the
project. Then I tried to contact some of the organizations I was interested in
working with but they were not interested in my proposal. Thinking about the lack
of response to my inquiry and looking for reasons to account for it, I came to
the idea that there is not enough interest to allow academics to get into the
organization’s planning –if any. They may think that they are the ones that are
doing the job and somebody asking and looking for information will bother them
and the practical benefits of this will not pay back their time. Another
thought about this is that they may think the information is required with
unknown reasons for them but may be possible harmful to their interests.
Finally, I concluded that the main reason is that they do not plan or do not
plan very well, even if they are required to do it following the guidelines of
their main stakeholder(s) as is the case of the organization that I will
analyze.
Marisela was analyzing a program that receives most of its funding from USAID, which has “state-like” performance monitoring requirements, but probably doesn’t enforce them very well.
The point is, however, that it is difficult for NGO’s to do strategic planning. Yet, if they don’t, they may become ineffective. The reason is simple: the issues with which the international system is called to deal are inevitably long-term and for NGO’s to be effective participants, they also have to be able to do the same kind of strategic planning that international organizations have to.
The added necessary competence, of course, is fund-raising: a skill at presenting what the organization is doing in such a way that funders are willing to contribute, not once, but consistently over time. I would argue that this is an easier sell if the organization can be strategic.
Looking to the remainder of the Twenty-First Century, I suspect we will see a continuation of the increase in public responsibilities of international organization as the capacity of what is now called the Sovereign State continues to erode. We can think of areas now where this will happen:
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Environment,
particularly in regulation and management of transborder elements, especially
climate change. If emissions trading
becomes a norm, there will need to be a significant international regulatory
presence and the need to fund national adaptation and mitigation (and manage
this) through institutions like the Green Climate Fund will increase dramatically. Similarly if the Loss
and Damage Fund is created and managed, this will be significant.
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Transnational
crime.
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Internet
governance, including intellectual property protection regulation and artificial
intelligence and trying to find ways of ensuring freedom of expression without
promoting misinformation.
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Management
of trade disputes.
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International
public investment, especially in communications and energy infrastructure (and,
if we things get really bad, issues like water resources).
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Pandemics
and contagious diseases generally.
I would hope that the kinds of humanitarian catastrophes that need international response will decrease, but I fear that the opposite will happen, and that international management of complex emergencies will continue to be a growth field.
In the final chapter of my book Invisible Governance, I argued that we now have to look at international management differently and will have to give it a new place in both theory and practice. I am now working on a new book, updating the old, tentatively called Will the UN Save the Planet looking at the new dimensions of international public management.
In all of this, there will be a need, growing and
diversifying, for persons trained to manage in this sometime rarified, but
always complex environment. Look to the
future, ad astra
per aspira.
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