Public Administration and Development, Vol. 17

Ten years ago, I used the epigram of Sir Robert Jackson (1969) to start an article on the question of control of the United Nations for the special issue of Public Administration and Development on the administrative reform process in international development organizations (Mathiason, 1987). Written at the time of the reform effort under the Group of 18, an intergovernmental expert group appointed by the General Assembly, it sought to examine the extent to which the reforms that were being agreed would take.

In 1997, there is another reform effort underway, this time being examined by some six committees and working groups of the General Assembly as well as task forces within the United Nations Secretariat. Like the 1986 reform effort, the current one was provoked by massive withholdings of assessed contributions by the United States, the major contributor to the United Nations budget. Many of the issues involved in this reform effort have been discussed in Gurstein and Klee (1996). As that analysis showed, the issues of control and accountability, that were thought to have been solved ten years ago, are clearly still alive.

What has changed, however, is the role and importance of the United Nations in a globalizing world. The increase in its political presence following the end of the cold war is far less important than the growth in transnational management functions that are being given to the international public sector represented by the United Nations system. For this reason, if for no other, the development of an effective command and control mechanism for the United Nations system is a central issue in reform.

This article examines the issue of command and control in a historical context and proposes new approaches to looking at the issue, based on an evolving concept of international public management. While international public management as an approach is in a nascent stage, it is beginning to be applied to the area of public finance (Mendez, 1992) and the examination of specific United Nations programmes (Smith, 1997). Origins in the approach can be found in an earlier article in Public Administration and Development (Mathiason and Smith, 1987).

The importance of the work of an international public sector, defined as multi-lateral institutions including particularly those of the United Nations system, is shown in the amount of resources that it has at its disposal to deal with issues about which it has been given responsibility. An examination of the various documents showing expenditure inthe United Nations system shows that in 1992, total contributions of governments and other sources to United Nations funds and programmes for development assistance totaled $4.8 billion to which should be added $870 million to the operational activities of the Specialized Agencies. In addition, $336 million was contributed to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, $4 billion to the International Development Association, $1 billion in capital subscription payments to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). The contributions totaled some $11.2 billion. In addition, some $6 billion was expended for peace and security and humanitarian operations. The annual budget of the United Nations Secretariat was over $1 billion and the combined administrative budgets of the other organizations of the United Nations system added up to another $1 billion. While the sums for peacekeeping have decreased during the past two years, the remainder have remained relatively constant since 1992. Disposing of almost $20 billion per year, the international public sector is larger than most of the governments on the planet.

The international public sector is composed of institutions that are above and beyond the nation-state. It is not a world government, but it has many of the attributes of a state, in terms of the types of services it delivers. It could be called a "supra-state".

A supra-state differs from the State in a critical respect: it lacks sovereignty, a central attribute of the nation-state. The United Nations Charter states that the Organization is based on the sovereign equality of all its Members. Sovereignty is not tangible; it is an a concept whose legitimacy is accepted. It presumes that there is, within each territory, some final authority that must be accepted, a monarch or a constitution which must be obeyed, that is accountable to the people of the State and which is recognized by other States.

No international organization has been given the attribute of sovereignty. Lacking it, public services are delivered indirectly and on delegation. In principle, they are delivered to or through States. The delivery machinery is therefore distant from and not easily perceived by the public, especially in developed countries where no direct services are provided. The secretariats of international organizations delivering services are largely invisible.

In the late twentieth century, however, many of the services are beginning to be delivered directly or with faint reference to the intermediary governments. In the area of humanitarian assistance, organizations of the international public sector provide direct services to large populations of refugees and displaced. In the area of monetary reform and trade, international organizations are beginning to deal directly with the market. Issues like the regulation of the Internet now require the participation of representatives of international organizations like the International Telecommunications Union and the World Intellectual Property Organization as well as governments and non-governmental organizations.

The role of the supra-state is becoming one of providing services that allow the market and the nation-state to function in a global environment that exceeds the grasp of either.

The sovereign-less character of the international public sector leads to two essential problems that must be addressed. How can the services that need to be delivered by international organizations best be defined in terms of comparative advantage, and how can accountability of a supra-state bureaucracy for its use of resources be ensured. The two issues are closely related: public services need to be effective; effectiveness is a key criterion for accountability. At the same time, control mechanisms wrongly devised can hamper effectiveness.

The sixteen organizations of the United Nations system and their component parts probably deal with every issue that the national public sector has to confront. The current medium-term plan of the United Nations (1990) itself covers ten major programmes that group forty-four programmes. The major programmes include (1) maintenance of peace and security, disarmament and decolonization, (2) implementation, codification and progressive development of international law, (3) international cooperation for economic and social development, (4) international economic cooperation for development, (5) international cooperation for social development, (6) regional cooperation for economic and social development, (7) human rights, fundamental freedoms and humanitarian affairs, (8) public information, (9) common support services, and (10) administrative services. While the structure of the plan appears duplicative, each segment represents a line of work that has evolved and continues to evolve. A similar picture can be found in the plans and budgets of each of the specialized agencies.

Each line of work responded to some political need and, for that reason, each programme has its defenders. Indeed, much of the unresolved reform debate centers on which issues the international public sector should address. The difficulty with this debate has been that, in some way, the international public sector should in fact address all of the issues.

In the end, the incremental nature of the budgets of the organizations of the United Nations system has meant that all issues are addressed, but with highly different degrees of effectiveness and with only a rough relationship between priority and resource allocation. When United Nations performance is trivial, the role of the organization is called into question, or the image of waste and ineffectiveness is projected. Effective United Nations programmes, in a context of competition for fixed amounts of resources, may be undercut by shortages in personnel and other objects of expenditure.

The question asked less frequently is, given that the organizations of the United Nations system should address all of the issues, how should each be addressed and what services should reasonably be provided by the international public sector as opposed to the nation-state or the market. The missing question is what is the United Nations’ comparative advantage in each issue area as a provider of public services.

For example, there is no doubt that transfer of science and technology to developing countries is an important issue. However, what is the realistic role that the United Nations can be expected to perform to deal with the issue, in contrast to the private sector? It may be that the role is limited to surveillance of policy developments to help guide the setting of international public norms governing technology transfer, rather than a larger role in the transfer itself. The current problems of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, whose mandate is primarily to assist developing countries in industrialization, derive less from the issue than from the fact that public sector industries have fallen from fashion and UNIDO has no real comparative advantage over the private sector in assisting in the creation and improvement of private industries.

Determining that comparative advantage, and applying it to programme delivery, is therefore an essential step in examining the workings of the international public sector.

How to determine the size and content of the United Nations budget has been a political issue since the first session of the General Assembly. The use of assessed contributions as the main means of financing activities, coupled with the one-country, one-vote system of the Assembly, led to a fear by major contributors that they could be forced into public expenditure growth that they would find unacceptable. There was also, perhaps, a fear that international secretariats pursuing their own agendas would distort Member State priorities.

The main crises of organizations of the United Nations system over their first fifty years have been financial crises, provoked by non-payment of contributions by one or another of the major contributors. In each case, the result was a revamping of the budgetary control system. For example, after the crisis of the mid-1960’s provoked by an unwillingness of the then-Soviet Union and to a lesser degree France to pay for peacekeeping assessments, the current separation of peacekeeping assessments from the regular budget was adopted. After the mid 1980’s financial crisis provoked by the non-payment of assessments by the United States, the current system of adopting a programme budget by consensus based on an agreed maximum size (the budget outline) was decided as a result of the work of the Group of 18. While the analysis centers on the United Nations proper, the same can be said for the specialized agencies, many of whom have suffered their own financial crises.

There has always been a tension between the absolute size of the budgets and the content of the budget. The concern of the major contributors with containing budgetary growth, has led to a focus on issues of "efficiency" defined in terms of output cost. One of the two advisory bodies for the General Assembly, the Advisory Committee for Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), concerns itself primarily with issues of efficiency as well as budgetary methodology (ratio of secretaries to professionals, vacancy rates, method of calculation of exchange rates, levels of proposed new posts).

In practice, the issue of overall budget size has been decided based on a willingness to pay criterion. The major contributors meet informally and agree on the size of the budget that they will tolerate and this becomes the limit. For most of the period since the mid-1980’s, there was a budget based on zero real growth, which allowed the absorption of inflation and currency fluctuation. While the developing countries argued for budgetary growth based on a presumption of increased responsibilities, they accepted the zero real growth imperative. In fact, I calculated that over six zero real growth budgets since 1984, the total real growth was fifteen percent based on comparing approved budgets with final budgets in successive budget documents. This was probably due to a combination of mid-budget adjustments for actual expenditure, use of a contingency fund and ultimately tolerated over-expenditure.

For 1996-1997, the Secretary-General proposed a negative real growth budget and this was further reduced by the General Assembly. For the 1998-1999 programme budget outline, in the face of probable withholding by the United States, a zero nominal growth rate was agreed, implying a mandated reduction over the budget period in real terms. In response, the Secretary-General began a series of efficiency efforts and downsizing (including a large-scale buy-out programme).

Like most governments, the budgets of organizations of the United Nations system are incremental. Each builds on the preceding budgets with changes at the margin. Programmatic change is politically easier when there is budgetary growth, since issues of priority among programmes can be settled by allocating the growth, while maintaining lower priority programmes as their base level. In a situation of no-growth budgets, increases in one type of programme have to be matched by decreases in others. Both scenarios require a review of programme content in order to verify priority and effectiveness, but this exercise is particularly crucial when confronted with zero or negative growth.

As a result of the reform effort of the 1970’s, which was intended to equip the organization to provide services for development more effectively, a complex process of programme planning was instituted, based on an application of Weberian rationality. These were embodied, by the 1980’s, in programme planning and budgeting rules and regulations to accompany the financial rules and regulations of the organization. The design was drawn from national experience as well as from experiments done by UNESCO.

As structured, the system is based on establishing a medium-term plan that will set broad priorities and orientations for the organization that can then be reviewed and approved. The plan becomes the intellectual framework for the biennial budgets that are prepared during the plan period, as well as the standard against which programme performance is monitored and evaluated. A rigorous procedure of programme monitoring and evaluation is set out.

In theory, the review of plans and budgets provides the means by which the Member States can control the Secretariats and provide guidance to the Secretary-General and other executive heads on directions to follow. The Committee for Programme and Coordination was designated as the technical body to perform that review in the mid-1970’s and its importance was reaffirmed and extended in the Group of 18 recommendations. The analysis done ten years ago showed that the CPC had not been particularly effective in changing programme priorities. Reflecting on the reform proposals that were about to be decided by the General Assembly, I proposed a number of performance measures (Mathiason, 1986, pp. 164-180).

The first measure was whether tne new philosophy would be reflected in the 1990-1995 medium term plan that was then going to be prepared and reviewed. I asked whether there would be innovative proposals, whether the plan would be used, as was expected under the current rules and regulations, to define the tasks of the organization and whether this definition would be submitted to debate, modification and agreement. If it was a continuation of the previous plan. which reflected less a coherent vision of the organization’s role than the accretion of programmes, the reform would have failed. If it did not propose new initiatives either on how programmes are related to each other, or in changes in priority based on a sharper conceptualization of the organization’s possibilities. it would have failed. Similarly. if the monitoring and evaluation of programmes was not strengthened and brought intentionally and visibly to bear on the secretariat proposals in the form of clear statements of what the organization does well and what it does not do well, the reform would have failed.

In fact, the organization did fail on this measure: the Secretary-General did not submit a new medium-term plan and there was therefore no review. Instead, the existing medium-term plan was extended for two years. The review of the 1992-1997 plan was perfunctory. In 1996, the proposed plan for the period 1998-2001 was reviewed. The CPC was unable to agree on all of the sections. It rejected the original introduction proposed by the Secretary-General as well as a revision. In the end, the matter had to be resolved by the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, which added programme priorities rather than reducing them. In fact, in the absence of any agreement on relative priorities, it asked the CPC to revisit the issue in 1997, on a post-facto basis.

The current system leads to an impasse between the Secretariat and the Member States. The Member States can agree on the overall size of the budget, but other than adding new material or possible upgrades of proposals, it is difficult to agree on programmatic changes to the Secretary-General’s proposals. The Secretary-General can thus be reasonably assured that his programmatic proposals, if they do not change dramatically from the past, will be accepted but that he will not have resources to change priorities. The Member States will be able to control overall budgetary amounts, but will not be able to affect programmes.

The CPC, in practice, reviews proposals piecemeal and on the basis of inadequate information. The plan and budget cycle means that a plan is formulated two years before the first budget that it is expected to govern, while programme performance data on the previous budget are not available until after the next budget is approved. Evaluations typically refer to the impact of programmes that took place at least two budget periods previously. As a result, discussions of programmes based on performance and demonstrated ability to deliver services do not take place. Instead, issues are evaluated in terms of their political content. Thus, for example, one of the changes made by the Fifth Committee in its review of the 1998-2001 plan was to upgrade disarmament from a subprogramme to a programme. The Secretary-General’s proposals reflected the fact that what the Secretariat could do for disarmament was limited; the Member States’ agreement reflected its perceived political importance.

A second performance indicator in my 1986 study related to the servicing of the CPC. I suggested that whether the change in the relationship between the secretariat and the governments had really occurred would be indicated very precisely by whether the CPC was provided with an independent secretariat and its terms of reference. The failure to establish an independent secretariat which has the capacity to provide alternative analyses to those presented by the Secretary General would be a clear indication that the reform has not taken hold.

The CPC was not given an independent secretariat and the consequences of not having an alternative analysis to that provided by the United Nations Secretariat are obvious in the CPC’s performance.

The machinery for control and accountability clearly needs to be revised in order to permit Member States properly to assess the service delivery performance and capacity of the supra-state.

The first step in improving control and accountability of the international public sector is the clearer sense of what the organizations do in terms of service provision. It can be argued that, through the existing legislative process, the Member States can oversee what could be called the Big Picture in terms of functions taken on. It can also be argued that through the details of the budget process and the oversight of implementation of existing rules (staff rules and regulations, financial rules and regulations) they can, if anything, over-oversee the Small Picture of how the organizations function. What is missing is an ability to oversee the Middle Picture, of service delivery.

A dilemma exists in the public control of the supra-state. Unlike the State where inadequate service delivery can be punished through the electoral process, or the Market where inadequate performance shown in yearly accounts can be punished by the stock market or by boards of directors, the international public sector has a kind of permanence that, absent delivery accountability mechanisms, resists reform. The permanence that ensures political neutrality and credibility is the supra-state’s greatest asset. It also makes positive control by outsiders, as well as inside managers, difficult.

Added to the dilemma is that, at the international level, the tradeoff between delivery efficiency and control mechanisms that inhibit efficiency in the name of accountability is particularly delicate. If, in the desire to ensure that funds are not misallocated or appropriated, it becomes difficult to spend funds to deliver services, the balance is tipped one way. If existing procedures to protect the integrity of staff against outside influence makes it impossible to remove less productive staff, the balance may be tipped the other.

The question of control of the international public sector remains an unanswered one in the reform process.

The existing control structure is heavily oriented toward the Small Picture. At the legislative level, the predominant influence of the ACABQ and the attendant weakness of the CPC, leads to a focus on objects of expenditure rather than programmes. At the internal accountability level, a stated priority of the Office of Internal Oversight Services is on detecting malfeasance, although that office’s charter extends well beyond a narrow audit or investigation function and the office is beginning to give higher priority to wider issues of management.

Within the Secretariat, despite calls for a new management culture, the international civil service protects itself with a series of rules, regulations and procedures that make rapid change very difficult. As a consequence, the amount of throughput resources, in terms of time, dedicated to internal management processes may be growing, although there are no good measures of this.

In one sense, the existing procedures are designed to count (and manage) the trees, but do not deal with the forest. It can be argued that the functioning of the trees needs to be judged by their place and role in the forest.

In the international system, all failures are political failures. Successes are less easy to measure. If the role of the organization is largely process-oriented, it is very difficult to claim credit for success. Indeed, the best that can usually be stated about an international programme is that it was associated with success. For example, if a treaty is negotiated, the success can be claimed by the Member States who negotiated the agreement and it would be less easy for the Secretariat to claim its share. The history of the Law of the Sea treaty gives considerable credit to Tommy Koh of Singapore, the President of the Conference, and little to the LOS Secretariat.

In order to assess effectiveness, rather than examining the general importance of the issue, an alternative is to look at the services intended to be delivered and see whether they have actually been developed. For example, there is no question that the transfer of science and technology is an important dimension of development policy, but what the international public sector can do to promote that transfer is limited. That is, the services that can be delivered are not in proportion to the problem.

An obvious first step is to clearly delineate, as part of the programming and budget process, the services being delivered. This places a demand on the internal processes of the organization, where it has been customary in programme planning to reflect on the importance of the issues rather than the relevance and effectiveness of the services. Programme managers seek to defend their proposals on the basis of the importance of the issue which is easier than justifying them on the basis of the relevance and effectiveness of the services rendered. The budget review process has historically been a matter of bargaining at the margin rather than a full-fledged review based on past performance. Budget presentation similarly hides what is actually done in favor of presenting verbal statements of the importance of issues, listing of inputs and a tally of outputs.

Examining effectiveness as part of the programme and budget review process will require an effort to classify the types of services delivered in ways different from those currently used, which are essentially output rather than outcome oriented. The next step is to apply this approach to review of the next budget and the oversight of the current budgets.

A focus on the Middle Picture of service delivery requires a re-thinking of the intergovernmental institutional structure, which is currently oriented to the Big Picture and the Small Picture, without connective tissue. It is the CPC in the United Nations proper that has the role of examining programme aspects of the budget. Its current limitations in this regard have already been noted.

It could be argued that a reform of the mandate of the CPC is not needed, but that considerable effort has to be made to upgrade its performance of that mandate. One innovation would be for the governments of the CPC to commission an independent assessment of the Secretary-General’s programme budget proposals in terms of service delivery, as a counterpoint to the analysis presented and defended by the Secretariat. This would provide the intergovernmental machinery with a common starting point for its examination of the proposals and could, if done carefully, help focus attention away from the issues and toward the services intended to deal with the issues.

Such an assessment would also permit placing the service delivery in a historical and comparative context, something that is essential in reviewing a process that is inherently incremental. It would also allow the kind of dialogue between executives and legislatures that characterize national consideration of budgets.

A well-functioning CPC could provide a techno-political basis for the final determinations to be made by the General Assembly and could constitute a model that could be applied to the review of programmes and budgets of the organizations of the United Nations system.

Within the Secretariat itself, a main issue is to ensure managerial direction by the Secretary-General without a delivery-stifling centralism. Coupled with this is a need to determine how effective programmes are performing. Both issues need re-thinking of Secretariat institutions.

In national governments, the budget process itself is a main vehicle for providing this direction and office of budget is usually located in the office of the Chief Executive. In the United Nations, the Office of Programme Planning and Budget is directly under the Controller and within the Department of Administration. This leads to an emphasis on a Small Picture approach to programme planning that is consistent with an emphasis on control rather than delivery (and dollar amounts rather than delivery amounts). Clearly rational control of expenditure is important, but so too is strategic planning based on performance and need.

An alternative to the present structure would be to locate an office concerned with strategic programme planning within the office of the Secretary-General. The function of that office would be to try to examine the Middle Picture in terms of the Big Picture and to provide advice to the Secretary-General on resource allocations within the Secretariat as a whole and in the context of the United Nations system. This could be done quickly within the executive authority of the Secretary-General. The regular budget functions could remain as they are.

For the matter of performance assessment, responsibility has been placed in the Office of Internal Oversight Services. Established to ensure an independent Secretariat voice for accountability, its public emphasis has been on detecting and dealing with administrative malfeasance. While it has the function of programme performance monitoring and evaluation, these functions do not seem to have been pursued as vigorously as they might, although some of the evaluations, including especially those of peacekeeping start-up, have had an impact on the institutions concerned.

Performance assessment based on a concept of service delivery would require some revision of monitoring methods and would make increased demands for timely evaluation. At present, it is output rather than outcomes that are monitored and evaluations come far too late in the programming process to affect new proposals.

Gurstein, M. And J. Klee (1996), "Towards A Management Renewal of the United Nations ", Public Administration and Development, 16 (Jan-Mar 1996).

Jackson, Sir Robert (1969), A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations System, Geneva: United Nations Development Programme, 1969.

Mathiason, J. (1986), "Who Controls the Machine", Public Administration and Development, 7 (No. 2 (April-June 1987.

Mathiason, J. (1997), "Delivering Global Services: What Next", paper prepared for the 38th Annual Conference of the International Studies Association, Panel on Developing an International Coping Mechanism: The United Nations and the Delivery of Global Services, Toronto, 18-22 March.

Mathiason, J. And D. Smith (1987), "The Diagnostics of Reform: The Evolving Tasks and Functions of the United Nations," Public Administration and Development, Vol 7 (No. 2).

Mendez, R. (1992), International Public Finance, New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, D. (1997), "International Provision of Local Services: the case of CIVPOL", paper prepared for the 38th Annual Conference of the International Studies Association, Panel on Developing an International Coping Mechanism: The United Nations and the Delivery of Global Services, Toronto, 18-22 March.

United Nations (1990), Medium-term Plan for the Period 1992-1997, document A/45/6/Rev.1.