Book Reviews

Dinosaurs or Dynamos? The United Nations and the World Bank at the Turn of the Century, by Helge Ole Bergesen & Leiv Lunde, London, Earthscan Publications, 1999, 221pp, appendix, refs, index, ISBN 1 853 83632 X www.earthscan.co.uk

Both the United Nations and the World Bank after over 50 years old. They were born in the aftermath of World War II. Their organisational structure, statutes and philosophy reflect the post-WW II birth, the Cold War and (in particular for the UN) the futile quest for a New International EconomicOrder in the 1970s. Both organisations are very large - the UN system employs in total over 50 000 people, spend substantial amounts of money (the UN about 10 billion per year, the World Bank about 20 billion). Different from commercial companies surviving through services to their customers in intensive competition, governments dependent on revenues provided by tax-payers-voters or non-governmental organisations funded by voluntary contributions from their members, these two large global public institutions are paid, largely, by their government-members. As any large organisation, they have now developed a vital self-interest in survival. This need is served by the most pious and moral language possible. The UN Secretary General says: "This is the age of the United Nations" and the World Bank president call his job a "God-given enterprise". It is now time for a critical assessment. Such assessment - which should be competent and professional - is not at all easy as both organisations produce a huge amount of directly or indirectly self-praising evaluation, assessment and biased information. The dilemma here is that most critical assessment is uninformed, and most informed assessment uncritical. It is certain that both organisations need the world. It is less certain if the world needs both organisations and in particular significant parts of it. The focus of this excellent study is to critically (and independently) assess the continued need for both institutions before a background of their history, their numerous internal reform efforts and current demands for the services of both institutions. The study was funded by the government of Norway which, together with the other Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, are the highest per-capita contributor to the United Nations - and so should have a legitimate interest in assessing critically - and independent of institutional interests - if their money is well spent. The authors start with a an ideal model of the two organisations: An organisation that is focused on raising concerns, engendering debate, encouraging agreement and developing norms should be non-hierarchical, participatory, global and wide-ranging. Organisational efficiency is of less importance than bringing all relevant actors together in a suitable and accepted forum. This is clearly the model underlying the UN system, a large "family" of independent, not coordinateable assemblies, committees, commissions, conferences, secretariats with numerous governing bodies - all dominated by the principle of equality of states and maximum access to decision-making. On the opposite side of the range of organisational structures is the original model of the World Bank: tightly focused on a single goal - raising money on capital markets by developing a first-class professional reputation and delivering loans on sound, carefully selected, projects. This type of organisation is hierarchically structured, centralised with emphasis on an effective decision-process and professional competence in staff. The authors then review the history of the UN, a case of relative success in absorbing significant issues from its global environment and a failure in terms of operational management. The main value of the UN (the authors focus on social, economic and environmental, not on peace and security issues) seems to be that it provides a suitable debating forum where in particular states with less power and resources feel they get a hearing; on the other hand, professional competence of UN staff has deteriorated significantly - partly due to the geographical representation, but more so to the politicisation of the personnel process and the much lesser weight given to professional competence. Similarly, ever more resounding moral trumpeting is contrasted with declining resources, competence and credibility. As issues, conferences and agenda proliferate, the organisation has lost its credibility to deliver effectively on anything. In reviewing the World Bank, the authors note that the originally tightly-focused and highly professional quasi-bank has over the last decades (pushed mainly by their presidents McNamara and Wolfensohn) moved much closer to the UN in its ambition to be the "premier development institution", a forum for setting agenda, producing global norms and discussing the multitude of new issues continuously brought to the international institutions by governments, NGOs and the media. The World Bank has advantages over the UN in terms of its traditional of professional competence, more tighter organisation and an emphasis on developing practically relevant know-how in its research and training departments. On the other hand, its embrace of practically any fashionable agenda item exposes it to the risk of becoming another UN - discoordinated, drowned in self-created illusions of grand catchwords contrasted with moderate effect. The authors note that those who pay both organisations - the member governments - provide less and less resources to them. The collapse of the Cold War has reduced the political impetus for funding multilateral development Aid. New actors such as the EU Commission (the authors neglect the EBRD and the growing role of some regional development banks) have more money to play with. As the authors demonstrate it is only in areas where the rich countries feel the need for global action (environment, climate change, human rights) that they are ready to fund multilateral action. In other areas - such as poverty - rhetoric is not matched by deed, and claims by the very rich elites dominating relatively poor countries that the democratically organised prosperous countries pay more money to them are somewhat hollow anyway. The authors conclude that the decades of UN reform - full of the same criticism, similar proposals but little action - find their main purposes in talking about reform rather than acting on it. For many arguments of criticism - the supposed need for greater coordination within the UN and between World Bank and the UN - are dubious. They hide bureaucratic power games and the misunderstanding of the organisations' own logic. As the authors say it, the UN is, quite legitimately, rather in existence for talking than for doing. And finally, they rightly point out that competition and diversity is much better for both organisations, than coordination which, as the past shows, won't work anyway. For the leaders and financiers of these organistions, this analysis appears much more valuable than the many internally generated reform discussions. It highlights an essential fact of life: That organisations should and need to identify and focus on their comparative strength in servicing their constituencies and benefit from exposure to competition. If parts of them can not survive, so much the better for the world, and capable redundant staff will find better opportunities to apply their competence anyway. The authors' conclusion coincides very much with a proposal I have made: that both the UN and the World Bank should be pressured to privatise some of their activities in order to enhance competition and provision of value to their constituencies.

Thomas Waelde, CEPMLP/Dundee

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