An Exercise on UNESCO Governance

Irina Bokova, the new UNESCO Director General

Yesterday we had a classroom exercise in the GWU graduate seminar on UNESCO focusing on the election of the UNESCO Director General last year. The seminar has focused on the history of UNESCO and UNESCO's programs to this point, while the exercise focused on UNESCO governance.

By UNESCO governance I mean

• its legislative bodies, the General Conference and its Executive Board with representatives of its member nations,
• the Director General which the legislative bodies elect, and
• the Director General's senior staff who are contracted and are not under the International Civil Service.

Fortuitously, the nine members of her senior staff were announced this week.

The students in the seminar are all Masters level students from the George Washington University International Education Program. While most are employed or have been employed, they do not have experience either with upper management or with the the political bodies that determine policy for intergovernmental organizations.

Thus the purpose of the exercise is to help students to understand not only the formal operation of the governance structures to set policy and direct operations, but also the way that the processes of governance affect the organization. For example, when UNESCO was created 65 years ago, the Executive Board was composed of individuals chosen for their personal excellence and their commitment to the purposes and program of UNESCO; some decades ago the UNESCO Constitution was changed and the Board was thereafter composed of the Permanent Representatives to UNESCO of those nations elected to serve on the Board. This change significantly affects the processes of the Board, its choice of Director General, and thus the Organization as a whole.

Describing the process by which Irina Bokova was elected Director General of UNESCO not only shows by example how the legislative processes work in UNESCO (and how governments use diplomacy to influence the choice of a Director General), but also help the students to understand what kind of person is likely to be elected to the post.

The nine candidates for UNESCO Chief

and the Chair of the Executive Board

The election has been termed especially contentious, but I suspect that there have been other occasions in which the election of the Director General has also been vigorously contested, such as that won by Luther Evans or that in which Amadou M'Bow finally declined to run for a third term.

What was different about this election was that it was held in the Internet age. It was possible to quickly obtain reports on the election for all parts of the world and it was even possible to search for reports in languages one does not speak and quickly obtain acceptable translations of the reports found via the Internet.

Utilizing these aids I was able to create a website on the election some months before the Executive Board met and to add material to the website on a continuing basis during the critical period. Surprisingly, a number of people stepped up to help me in that effort and indeed people working for various candidates also began to correspond with me. I assigned students the website as a resource for the class exercise.

The naming of the nine senior staff members (Deputy Director and eight Assistant Directors General) provided an opportunity to discuss the problems not only in finding experts to lead the various program and administrative units within the Organization, but also to achieve geographic and gender balance, a team that can work together well with each other and the Director General, and to satisfy the Ambassadors from the key member nations and the various UNESCO constituencies.

If you are interested in obtaining the Power Point presentation for the class exercise, the educational objectives for the exercise and other related materials, please send an email request to: john.daly@gmail.com

The Executive Board in session.

UNESCO Symposium Offered for 4th Time

Students doing presentation on the UNESCO culture program

The seminar on UNESCO offered in the International Education Program of George Washington University is nearing completion. During the semester approximately half of the sessions are led by students who present overviews of the various programs of UNESCO. The other half of the classes are devoted to people with long experience with the Organization describing their experience, focusing on the history of the Organization and the process of representation to UNESCO. In the four semesters the course has been offered, 55 students have developed a detailed comprehensive understanding of UNESCO, and indeed have learned how to study a large complex organization. Click here for a detailed description of the course as it was offered last year.

Students attending to the presentation

Class: The Social and Human Science Program of UNESCO

This is the smallest of UNESCO's five programs both in terms of approved budget and in terms of extrabudgetary resources contributed by member states. Yet it is also quite diverse in content.


The Management of Social Transformations program is the leading program dealing with social sciences as usually defined in the United States. Rather than organize the effort around traditional disciplines such as Economics, Sociology and Anthropology, or around Area Studies such as Latin American Studies, it takes an approach based on comprehensive studies of the processes of transition going on in so many societies. However, UNESCO is also involved in the production of a World Social Science Report and publishes a Social Science Journal.

There is a strong focus on the Ethics of Science and Technology based on the activities of World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology (COMEST) and its Bioethics committees. UNESCO has provided the forum for the development of declarations on bioethics, and provides an online Bioethics Observatory. It is also involved in capacity building efforts oriented towards developing nations.

UNESCO has produced a number of regional histories, drawing on experts from the areas discussed. The multi-volume studies, such as those of African history and the history of the Silk Road, provide encyclopedic reviews.

In the field of human rights, UNESCO's Social and Human Sciences Program works

• to encourage and disseminate human rights research;
  
• to promote education in human rights;
  
• to lead action in the fight against all forms of discrimination at national, regional and international level;
  
• to encourage cooperation among all actors and networks;
  
• to promote democracy and
  
• to further reflection on new forms of violence, notably by drawing up regional plans for human security.

UNESCO also promotes a human rights approach to the efforts to reduce poverty. It has sponsored the World Conference on Human Rights.

UNESCO has received considerable publicity for an aspect of its program in Sports Ethics -- The Anti Doping Convention -- in conjunction with the Olympic Games.

John Crowley: Towards a Culture of Peace and Knowledge
(This video was shown to the class.)

Class: "UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century"

The UNESCO Headquarters illuminated
© UNESCO/N. Guy

Our GWU seminar discussed the future of UNESCO last night. The two hour session began with three brief presentations>

Frank Method began the class with a discussion of demographic trends of the next 40 years. While much of the educational effort for less and least developed nations has been focused on expanding educational services both to increase enrollment and to meet the demands of increasing numbers of children, those pressures will be decreased in future decades and the numbers of children may even decrease in some countries such as China and India. On the other hand, the numbers of people over 60 years of age will increase rapidly, implying needs to educate people for their longer lives among other things. Frank pointed out that UNESCO is the logical forum for international policies to be worked out in response to these demographic trends. He also pointed out that UNESCO has been deeply involved in a number of multiyear educational programs which will end in the next few years, and there will probably be a need to find new vehicles for international cooperation. Frank suggested that in the future there would be need for more focus on educational quality, on vocational education, on higher education and on educational technology than in the past.

Ray Wanner referred back to the response of Archibald MacLeish, the head of the U.S. delegation at the founding of UNESCO, when asked about the program of the Organization. MacLeish suggested the metaphor of a kite on the ground that would lift and fly in response to breezes and changes in the wind. UNESCO would similarly respond to currents of international thought and dialog. In fact this has happened again and again, as in the case of the creation of the World Heritage Convention or the creation of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Next week the World Digital Library will be launched, representing the latest major initiative; it was proposed in 2005 at the U.S. National commission meeting by the Librarian of Congress, and has gone through the complex approval process resulting in a network of major libraries around the world working with a platform developed by industrial partners.

Ray also described the complex governance process of UNESCO, which involves a General Conference of about three weeks every other year with delegations from all the member nations. The Executive Board, of 58 nations, has business several-week-long meetings twice a year, with additional information meetings. These cost the organization $14 million per year, and require the presence of senior staff at all plenary sessions. The next meeting of the Executive Board has 60 agenda items, for each of which the Secretariat has produced a supporting document translated into five languages.

I (John Daly) sought to promote serious and original thinking by suggesting for discussion the proposition that UNESCO should be broken up. I summarized a critique of the diversity of programs and their lack of synergy, the governance, the system of election of Directors General, the lack of serious concern for its mission "building the defenses of peace in the minds of men", and the resultant unwillingness of member nations to budget adequately for UNESCO to carry out its many missions. I also pointed out that programs such as education, water and world heritage both met an increasing need and were widely regarded as effective within their constraints. I suggested that the United States might still have the clout to lead an effort to unbundle the programs of UNESCO, but that increasingly its influence in UNESCO governing bodies would be diminished as other countries successfully improved their economies and sought influence in world forums.

I suggested that therefore UNESCO might be broken up into a World Education Organization, A World Water Organization and a World Heritage Organization. While some programs would be abolished, others might be transferred to other intergovernmental organizations (Basic Sciences to the Trieste System, Copyright to the World Intellectual Property Organization, Doping in Sports to the World Anti-Doping Organization, etc.).

The Discussion

The discussion generally focused on defending the continued existence of UNESCO. Arguments for UNESCO included that:

• it has a relatively well known, accepted and prestigious brand,
• there are synergies among its programs, and efforts such as those helping children in conflict situations would suffer,
• that the human rights focus fundamental to UNESCO is important, it it would probably be impossible to negotiate an agreement on a comparably strong support for freedom of expression and freedom of religion in new organizations.

It was noted that efforts to spin off programs from UNESCO were not always successful. The the MIRCEN microbiological network has gone silent when it was dropped from the UNESCO family of programs, even though such microbiological fields such as biotechnology and genetics are becoming increasingly important. In that context it was suggested that programs such as science education and vocational education which were deemphasized when the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore pulled out of UNESCO have never been adequately restored.

Especially interesting was the discussion of the important role of UNESCO as a forum for discussion. At the General Conference heads of government and Government Ministers get a chance to meet and discuss issues in an environment that minimizes conflict and promotes reasoned discourse. During the course the role of UNESCO's Future Forum and its ability to convene the heads of the UN agencies to work our common approaches to problems such as those imposed by the current global economic crisis were not emphasized. Thus this discussion provided an important complement to the discussions of individual programs.

The discussion also focused on my critique of UNESCO's governance and management. Arguments were advanced that modest improvements could and should continue to be made. It was also argued that while the plenary sessions of UNESCO's governing bodies tend to be dominated by diplomats, there are associated round tables "crackling with energy" at which sectoral experts do in fact provide effective guidance to UNESCO's Secretariat. It was noted that UNESCO's style of governance and management allows flexibility that is often conducive to innovation and initiative. Finally, it was suggested that while the view of UNESCO using models of top-down bureaucratic management suggest permanent problems of coordination and efficiency, newer models of networked organizations might also be applied; as the world learns more about network management we may see improvements in the efficiency and coordination of the operations of UNESCO's distributed networks of Institutes, Centers, Clubs, National Commissions, World Heritage Sites, Biosphere reserves, Associated Schools, University Chairs and Networks, etc.

While a couple of hours is not enough time to discuss the future of UNESCO in any detail, the session tended to draw upon the foundation laid during the rest of the semester to focus student attention on the future of the Organization.

Class: U.S. Foreign Policy and UNESCO - A View from the Top

Esther Brimmer

Recently confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State
for International Organizations

Michael Southwick spoke to our graduate seminar last night, drawing from his experience as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and especially on his experience as the United States rejoined UNESCO.

Michael Southwick (and Frank Method)

There was a confluence of circumstances that resulted in the U.S. reentry into UNESCO:

• It was generally agreed that the problems that had been cited when the United States withdrew from UNESCO had been ameliorated or resolved.
• President Clinton had made a public statement at the end of his administration that the United States should rejoin UNESCO when the United States had paid the billion dollars it owed to the United Nations agencies. Thus when the debt had been repaid, the support of the Democratic leadership could be counted upon.
  
• The State Department had done a low-level internal review of the value of UNESCO membership in terms of U.S. foreign policy interests which concluded that membership in UNESCO offered a low-cost alternative to achieve U.S. objectives in international education, science and culture, that UNESCO would be more effective than bilateral agencies in some locations important to U.S. foreign policy, and that letting UNESCO work in other locations would relieve the need for the U.S. government to take action.
• Rep. Tom Lantos had introduced legislation in the House of Representatives calling for reentry which had passed.
• The United Kingdom and Japan were strongly supporting U.S. reentry into UNESCO, and were combining personal appeals with more formal diplomatic contacts.
  
• Key gatekeepers in the State Department and White House supported the reentry, as did the Secretary of Education and the First Lady.
  
• Surprisingly, there had been no delegations from civil society leaders (in education, science or culture) to the State Department advocating reentry, and surprisingly there had been no request from Rep. Lantos for inputs from State on his UNESCO legislative initiative.
  

While the process was put on hold due to 9/11, it was found convenient to announce reentry when President Bush made a major address to the United Nations General Assembly. He received a standing ovation on making the announcement, something that is both exceptional and against UN rules on that announcement.

The reentry into UNESCO remained controversial within the Republican Party, but the opponents were unable to muster their forces when the decision was made; they were able to do so later, and key members of the Bush administration were only won over to support for UNESCO with years of experience with the organization.

Ambassador Southwick indicated that UNESCO one of 42 intergovernmental agencies for which the State Department Bureau of International Organization Affairs provides U.S. representation, and indeed receives less attention than others such as the United Nations itself.

He emphasized the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the operations of the United Nations system, and characterized UNESCO (as seen from State) as the soul of the system, the agency in which intellectual leaders could debate important issues. UNESCO is a place in which American diplomats can hold serious discussions with diplomats from Islamic nations.

Within the State Department, the most prestigious posts deal with major countries -- Russia, China, etc. Foreign Service Officers, chosen for their economic and political expertise, depend on officers from other government agencies for substantive leadership as they deal with the specialized agencies in areas such as education, public health and agriculture. (He described leading a 90 person delegation to a meeting of the International Postal Union, in which 85 delegates came from the Postal Service including the Post Master General. U.S. Government policy is that even in such technical discussions, delegations be led by diplomats rather than sector specialists.) In these circumstances, there is little understanding of U.N. mission agencies in the higher levels of the State Department, and little attention to their programs.

In the discussion, Ambassador Southwick distinguished between the United Nations treaties, for which negotiations are led by diplomats, and programs of cooperation and assistance. He noted the fact that many key UN treaties have not been ratified by the United States, and the difficulties involved in trying to explain that failure to ratify a treaty does not imply opposition to its objectives.

One of his more interesting comments compared the process of negotiating an international agreement in a UN conference to the process of serving as a liaison of the State Department with the Congress. In both cases it pays to develop a strategy, recognizing the structure of the body in which the debate is taking place, and focusing on the key players in the negotiation.

There was some discussion of the means by which different governments influence international negotiations, ranging from diplomat-to-diplomat requests for support, to block voting, arm twisting of heads of government by heads of government, offers of increases in foreign aid, and even illicit financial incentives.

This was an exceptional opportunity for graduate students to get the straight information from someone who was really in the know, having lived the diplomatic process for years under different administrations. As such, it was an opportunity that might be unique in the Washington DC university system.

Check out:

• The State Department website for the National Commission for UNESCO
• The website of the U.S. Permanent Delegation to UNESCO

Students Calder, Auten, Khouri, Tew and Cline
(and Method) listening to the speaker

Class: The UNESCO Commuication and Information Program

Sagarmatah community radio studio, Nepal, © UNESCO

Last night a student presented the Communication and Information Program of UNESCO to our seminar. She covered the organizational structure of the Secretariat, the program priorities and budget, the history of the program, the themes of the program, and the networks and partners involved in the program, with examples. She spent some time on the "New World Information Order" controversy that was cited in the decisions by the United States and United Kingdom to withdraw from UNESCO. She also described the UNESCO role in the World Summit on the Information Society and its followup.

The student remarked that she had been quite concerned in developing the class because it was difficult (if not impossible) to understand the program being described from the set of alternative perspectives available to her. She finally concluded that the differing perspectives were useful in helping people find the aspects of the program most interesting to themselves.

In thinking about the multiple perspectives, I was reminded of my engineering drawing classes decades ago. In those we were asked to draw orthogonal projections of three dimensional objects. It was hard to get the knack of representing a complex three-dimensional object in three two-dimensional views and to reverse the process of visualizing the object from its formal drawn representation. Having gained the knack, however, you could better understand the object from the multiple views than from any two dimensional picture. So too, I think the multiple views of UNESCO's program give a fuller understanding than any single view would allow.

A gifted teacher, our leader effectively used the classroom computer and internet connection as well as teaching aids and stimulated discussion from time to time with well chosen questions.

I was especially taken with her opening of the class with an exercise. Students were divided into groups, and each group provided with a package of paper cutouts representing the blocks of an organizational diagram for the program. They were told to race in sticking the blocks on the wall in the correct order. The effect was to get students fully involved in studying the organization managing the CI program; it was one of the most effective approaches I ever saw in getting students to focus on an organizational diagram.

There was a kicker. One team finished the complex diagram while the other had done less than half. Our leader asked why they thought that was true. After an embarrassed pause she revealed that she had provide a copy of the real organizational diagram to only the winning team. Her point: information counts, and the Communication and Information Program of UNESCO is important.

It is interesting that both groups were constrained by prior conceptions of what an organizational diagram should look like. Both sought a conventional representation although it would have been faster to stick the block on the wall in random order. Our leader pointed out that unconstrained by the model organizational diagram, students might have been more creative in illustrating the nature of the relationship in the staff responsibilities for program elements.

I was again struck by the disparity between the need for an intergovernmental body to provide leadership to the United Nations system with respect to the developing knowledge economy and the resources available to UNESCO for that purpose. The ICT Industry alone is more than $3 trillion per year, and the UNESCO CI budget (which focuses on much more than ICT) is some $36 million per year. No wonder that many of the program activity descriptions on the website seem to be sparsely populated.

Class Exercise: ExBrd Working Group on Old City of Jerusalem

Last night in our UNESCO Seminar we did a role playing exercise based on a real negotiation that took place in May, 2007 in the context of a Special Session of the Executive Board of UNESCO.

The Old City of Jerusalem has been inscribed in UNESCO's World Heritage List since 1981. There is a ramp leading from the square in which the Wailing Wall (perhaps the most sacred place in Judaism) is located to the mount above where the Al Aqsa Mosque (which includes the Dome of the Rock), one of the holiest sites in Islam.

A retaining wall supporting the ramp failed and the Israeli authorities began archaelogical works prior to restoring the ramp. The communication between Israeli and Palestinian archaeological authorities has long been broken, and Palestinians were concerned as to the scope and purpose of those works, which they felt should have been under Arab auspices; the site of course holds remains of more than 1000 years of Muslim rule and occupation. The World Heritage Center was also experiencing difficulties communicating with the Israeli authorities.

Arab delegates asked for the Special Session of the Executive Board to review the situation. A subcommittee of the Executive Board was formed to draft a resolution on the matter, to be considered by the entire 58 member Board. The subcommittee consisted of Delegates from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Norway, the Palestinian Authority, and the United States as well as the Deputy Director General of UNESCO. In our role playing exercise, students took the roles of these participants.

A team consisting of the Director a staffer from the World Heritage Center, the Director-General of ICCROM and the President of ICOMOS had previously visited Jerusalem and investigated the situation; their report was made available to the subcommittee.

The purpose of the exercise was to help the students understand the complexity of such a negotiation and the many levels at which it take place.

Of course, a common concern among all the Delegates was the preservation of a site which is of huge cultural importance to billions of people, and which is must be managed to accommodate millions of visitors.

Underlying the negotiation of course was a concern for the potential for violent confrontations in Jerusalem. The Al Aqsa Intifada was ignited at the very location under discussion. And of course, the negotiation was conducted in the context of the overall Peace Process in which Norway and the United States have played key roles.

The participants in the Working Group were unanimous in their statements that the issue should not be dealt with as a political issue, yet of course the Delegates were all diplomats of ambassadorial rank, and the venue was not the specialized agencies dealing with monuments and heritage sites, nor the World Heritage Center, but rather the governing body of UNESCO itself.

Students discussed the fact that each participant in the negotiation faced domestic constituencies that were very concerned with the condition of the sites and the political contexts. Israel's government was facing upcoming elections and the Palestinian authority was soon to dissolve in civil war; a large portion of the Jordanian population describes itself as Palestinian.

The media was characterized as influential in the negotiations even if not present. While U.S. media were silent on the situation, it was extensively covered in Israeli, Palestinian and Arab media. While the actual conduct of the negotiation would not be revealed, the results would be publicized in the countries of several of the delegates.

Moreover, Delegates were likely to be concerned with groups of nations, as the European Delegate might have been concerned with representing the views of European powers, and the Arab nations with representing other Arab and Islamic nations.

It was recognized that much of the work of the committee would be done outside of the meeting room, that the Delegates were likely to have received instructions from their governments, and that there were possibilities of incentives being offered or sanctions being threatened in the process of the negotiations. Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are all heavily dependent on European and American support.

While the secretariats of UNESCO and other involved organizations were concerned with the integrity of the organizational processes, they must also have been concerned with the potential benefits and threats implied by the negotiation to their own organizations. The key organizational members were the heads of their respective organizations, rather than lower level technical staff.

And of course the Delegates were individuals, with their own ideological positions. One at least was probably chosen both as a neutral party and because of the respect he had earned as a skilled and experienced diplomat. Two of the Secretariat members have since been mentioned as attractive candidates in this year's election of a new UNESCO Director General. And of course, while all were internationally experienced, each Delegate came from his/her own cultural background -- Arab, Israeli, Scandinavian, Texan, etc. and might have understood the negotiations in part from that cultural background.

We reviewed the actual Resolution that had been approved

• which documented the previous agreements that set the stage for the current resolution
• recognized the universal cultural importance of the site
  
• acknowledged the work of the team that had done the site visit
• referred future work on the issue to the World Heritage Center
• called upon Israel to provide more information and coordinate with Islamic authorities on the works, and
• thanked the Secretariat for its work

The students agreed that this resolution probably represented a result which did not fully achieve the objectives of any party, but which all parties could accept. It clearly represented a substantive and informative product of detailed negotiation. The United States diplomats thought the negotiation very successful, but we had little insight as to the satisfaction of other Delegates in the outcome.

The seven students and two coordinators had a lively, two hour discussion greatly facilitated by the fact that all of the students had prepared for the class. A fairly extensive set of case study materials had been made available for their review prior to the class, but most had gone beyond those materials.

Comments on the Budget of UNESCO

One of the more difficult issues for the students in my class has been to understand the budget of UNESCO. I did this simple spreadsheet (click on it to enlarge) to help them to understand the Organization. It describes the budget for the two year period, of almost one billion dollars.

The UNESCO budget is divided between the Approved budget funded from the assessed contributions of the member nations, and the extra-budgetary resources which are voluntary contributions made to specific projects and units of the organization. (There are lots of activities done under the UNESCO umbrella which are not included in these budgets, such as those of the so called "Category 2 Centers", National Commissions, Associated Schools, and University Chairs, not to mention the in kind services of people consulted by UNESCO.)

Note first that more than one-third of the expected funding is extra-budgetary. On the one hand, this allows the donors to direct the funding to efforts that they feel are especially valuable; on the other hand, the Organization's focus is heavily dependent on the contributions it can obtain as donations.

Part II of the budget, which includes the direct budgets for the various programs of UNESCO (including direct staff and other direct expenses), represents only about 70 percent of the total, and that is about equally divided between assessed contributions and voluntary contributions. I suspect that this is a glitch in the accounting principals. Thus the communication of UNESCO's work done via the Internet is probably accounted as supporting services, while I would regard that communication as one of UNESCO's more important functions. So too, some of the meetings hosted by UNESCO would seem to be accounted as part of the direction, but may also represent an important function of the organization as promoting dialog and serving as a clearinghouse for ideas.

Note how the balance of approved and extra-budgetary resources differs from program to program. The education program appears to be the priority for UNESCO as viewed from its Approved budget, while the natural science program would appear to be the priority of the nations making voluntary contributions.

I would also note that the budget for the social and human sciences program is smaller than that for other programs. Given the importance that improved understanding of economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, management sciences, psychology, cognitive science, etc. could have for the world, this is too bad. On the other hand, it would be hard to justify taking money away from starved programs of education, natural sciences, culture and communications to build new capacities in UNESCO. More resources are clearly needed.

If one were to take a billion dollar budget for an organization with UNESCO's charter and allocate it optimally, this is not the budget that would result. Rather this is the budget that funds the UNESCO organization and program that has evolved over six decades, under the influence of a complex legislative and bureaucratic decision making process, and the willingness of the more affluent nations to fund the Organization.

Why is UNESCO the Way it Is?

Michael Abiola Omolewa, President of the General Conference 2003
Photo by Andrew Wheeler © UNESCO

The Problem

Students in our UNESCO seminar are increasingly aware that the Organization has some quirks. For example:

• UNESCO stresses programs in Africa but most of its staff is in Paris.
  
• Its budget is tiny compared to the huge global challenges it faces in education, science, culture and communications.
  
• While :Science" was added to the UNESCO Charter almost as an afterthought, there are now both "natural science" and "social and human science" programs; the combined science budget is larger than that for either the education or the culture programs.
  
• The social and human science includes sports and philosophy, but not disciplinary programs in economics, sociology, anthropology and the other social sciences.
  
• UNESCO is supposed to focused on promoting progress in developing nations, yet it has relatively little focus on promoting the applications of social science knowledge for that purpose, nor on promoting cultural changes that will facilitate such development.
• While two-thirds of the UNESCO budget comes from assessed contributions, the rest is from extrabudgetary resources which are always hard to predict and which tend to bias efforts away from those directed by UNESCO's governing bodies.
• The governance is vested in an unwieldy 193 nation General Conference that meets only every other year, but largely delegated to a 58 member Executive Board that also meets relatively infrequently and is also unwieldy.

Moreover, there are other governance bodies for portions of the program, and a couple of score of "Category 2" UNESCO Centers as well as hundreds of UNESCO Chairs which are not funded by UNESCO, nor effectively governed by its governing bodies.

The question comes up, how did the Organization come to be so quirky? One thing is clear. UNESCO is not the result of a rational decision as to how to allocate available resources to best achieve the Organization's mission.

The Charter

Perhaps surprisingly, there is and always has been a considerable effort to keep the Organization's programs closely linked to UNESCO's original charter which focuses the Organization on building the defenses of peace in the minds of men, promoting global efforts in education, science, culture and communications towards that end. (Students in our class have been treated to a lecture by Dick Arndt and Ray Wanner on how that charter was created, and have been provided with readings on the subject.)

The UNESCO Secretariat generally tries to do that which its member nations instruct it to do through UNESCO's governing bodies. It does so with the resources that are available for those purposes. While that is true, that statement does not respond to the fundamental questions about the decision making that resulted in the current structure of UNESCO and the composition of the portfolio of its programs.

Incrementalism and Fit

Clearly, an important factor in UNESCO's design is the niche that it fills within the web of intergovernmental organizations. That web itself has been evolving since World War II. UNESCO is clearly seen as complementary to the United Nations, and is deeply affected by U.N. products such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Millennium Development Goals. UNESCO seeks to work in ways complementary to the efforts of other decentralized agencies such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. So too, it seeks to complement the efforts of United Nations programs and funds such as the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF). It participates in United Nations interagency programs such as the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, and works in the context provided by other United Nations bodies such as the Human Rights Commission, the High Commission on Refugees, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development and the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development.

UNESCO today is the result of six decades of incremental decision making. Decisions were made at each step that had to take into account the then existing staffing and organization of UNESCO, its existing programs and their importance and degrees of success. Essentially there is a kind of inertia in an organization and a program as large and complex as those of UNESCO.

During this long period there were major trends in international diplomacy that had profound affects on decision making affecting UNESCO. UNESCO's programs evolved from helping to repair the intellectual systems damaged by World War II, to dealing with problems raised by the Cold War, to helping with nation building that followed decolonization, to dealing with the cultural impacts of globalization.

Governance

To understand the decisions that have influenced UNESCO one must consider its governing bodies. The delegates to these bodies can be expected to function in predictable ways, forming coalitions, trading votes, etc. UNESCO's General Conference delegations each represent a member nationl each delegation is usually composed of government officials and representatives of the national educational, scientific and cultural communities, often as members of the national commission for UNESCO. The members of a delegation do not always agree on how to promote the interests of the country that they represent; delegations vary in success according to the interests and abilities of their delegations.

Decisions made by a government with respect to UNESCO are affected by and affect the position of that government with respect to other agencies. This year a new Director General is to be elected by the UNESCO General Conference on the basis of a recommendation from the Executive Board. Few individual decisions are likely to have more impact on the organization and programs of UNESCO. Several announced and several unannounced candidates are angling for the post. Each will wish for his/her government to use all of its diplomatic means to advance his/her candidacy. However, the governments are concerned with the entire web of intergovernmental organizations and overall foreign policy. In choosing to offer or deny support to their own national they must consider other elections in other organizations. The debts incurred in lobbying for a candidate for UNESCO will generally have to be paid in some other venue at some other time; the favors given to other nations can be redeemed in other elections.

Decisions with respect to UNESCO, however, are not made by member states in isolation. This year a new Director General is to be elected by the General Conference on the basis of a recommendation from the Executive Board. Few individual decisions are likely to have more impact on the organization and programs of UNESCO. Several announced and several unannounced candidates are angling for the post. Each will depend on his/her government to use all of its diplomatic means to advance his/her candidacy. Yet the governments are concerned with the entire web of intergovernmental organizations and overall foreign policy in choosing to offer or deny such support. The debts incurred in lobbying for a candidate for UNESCO will generally have to be paid in some other venue at some other time.

For the outsider, understanding decision making in UNESCO's governing bodies is difficult. The culture of governance of intergovernmental organizations tends to hide processes and disagreements. Public decisions are often made by consensus to project unanimity but only after it becomes clear to the delegates which option is most popular. While insiders in the delegations and ministries of foreign affairs may be very much aware of disagreements, the outside public seldom is.

The Secretariat

If in theory legislative bodies make policy and executive agencies implement policy, in practice executive bodies lobby and use other techniques to influence legislation and extend policy in implementation. In the case of UNESCO, the original planners of the organization -- in the belief that its legislative body would be unwieldy -- designed the Organization with strong powers in the office of the Director General. The eight elected Directors General have left the imprints of many of their decisions on the organization.

Decades of development of management science has revealed that decision making in bureaucracies is decentralized to varying degrees, is often done by committees rather than individuals and is often implicit rather than explicit. Even the explicit decisions are made with limited rationality and incomplete information. The cumulative set of bureaucratic decisions has profound influence on the structure, procedures and culture of the organization, and thus on organizational performance.

In the case of UNESCO, the Secretariat is multinational, multiethnic and multilingual, located in scores of offices spread across the entire world. Educational, scientific, cultural, and communications officials also come from different professional cultures. The come to the organization with different educations, different work experiences, in different countries. Decision making in a bureaucracy so staffed can not be simple.

The Professional Communities

The Man and the Biosphere Program of UNESCO is generally considered to have grown out of the consensus created in a scientific meeting. Similarly, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission is believed to have been created as a result of lobbying by Roger Revelle and other oceanographers. Indeed, the addition of science to UNESCO's charter is attributed importantly to the efforts of Joseph Needham to raise support among an international network of scientists.


These are examples of fundamental decisions affecting UNESCO which came out of the scientific community. Similar examples could be adduced for the other UNESCO programs of initiatives arising from the intellectual community served by the program. UNESCO was specifically designed to serve and link the intellectual communities of its member nations. Indeed, UNESCO's constitution, calling for national commissions drawn from civil society as well as government, is unique and was intended to involve the larger educational, scientific, cultural and communications communities not only in UNESCO's work but also in its governance.

As scientists network internationally via meetings and journals, so too do members of the other UNESCO communities network globally within their own professional communities. Indeed, with improvements in transportation and communications, this networking has become much stronger. Not only do professionals travel more often to international meetings, but journals have proliferated as has their international distribution, and the Internet and other modern communications technologies have resulted in a quantum leap in speed and a radical reduction of costs as compared with snail-mail communication.

Social scientists are improving their understanding of such professional networks. We know something about how their structure influences their behavior. We know that there are individuals who are especially important in communications networks, and that influence and authority are not uniformly distributed within the networks. Social science research is thus helping us to understand how professional leaders, well connected and authoritative within their professional communities, can lead decision making within the educational, scientific, cultural and communications communities.

Conclusion

UNESCO's structure, procedures and programs have thus evolved over time, under the influence of major global trends, based on the decisions made in its member states, its legislative bodies, the bureaucracy of its Secretariat, and its constituent communities. So too, reforms and improvements in the organization will come from decisions made in these arenas through a complex process of negotiation and compromise.

The history of the organization shows that individuals and non-governmental organizations (as well as governments) can have profound influence on UNESCO. Efforts to improve the organization will probably not work well if naively based on simplistic models of rational decision making, but may be quite effective if they are advanced through recruitment of allies, networking, and coalition building.

A Comment on the Natural Science Program of UNESCO

Frank Method and I are coordinating a graduate seminar at George Washington University titled "UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century". Last night one of the students presented an overview of UNESCO's natural science program and led a discussion of that program.

Her presentation showed the complexity of UNESCO's natural science activities with

• five major intergovernmental programs (Hydrology, Geosciences, Oceanography, Man and the Biosphere, and Basic Sciences) each with its separate governing board,
  
• a number of other activities directly under the control of headquarters,
  
• two UNESCO Institutes (The International Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Water Education) with their own governing bodies, and
• a strong science statistics effort in the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

There are also some 200 UNESCO university chairs in the natural sciences, as well as 22 Category 2 UNESCO science centers. These Category 2 centers are do not depend on UNESCO for funding and separate governance mechanisms. UNESCO also influences the global natural science community via programs and activities managed by its

• 27 cluster offices covering 148 member states,
  
• 21 national offices (each serving a single member state),
  
• 10 regional bureaus (5 of which -- Nairobi, Cairo, Jakarta, Venice and Montevideo -- are for sciences),
  
• and liaison offices in Geneva an New York.

UNESCO can reach out to the scientific community through its linkages with 350 NGOs (including key professional associations in science and engineering), partnerships with the private sector, thousands of UNESCO clubs and Associate Schools, and through the National Commissions for UNESCO in each of its 193 member states.

The UNESCO natural science program publishes many books and a few journals, publishes The World Science Report, and holds occasional global meetings on aspects of science policy. It has promoted global networking through such efforts as its global network of biosphere reserves. It has raised global awareness of the importance of natural sciences in social and economic development.

There are significant problems in understanding the impact of the natural science program. Hydrology can be used as an example. Many people do not recognize the importance of Hydrology and the impact it has on their lives. However, in a world facing future water shortages in many places, understanding the magnitude of water resources and the ways in which those resources may be managed will have increasing economic value, and indeed may help to maintain peace. Hydrology informs road and railroad builders as to how to protect their constructions from washing out. It informs urban planners as to how to plan flood-safe neighborhoods. It informs agricultural planners about beneficial and dangerous water conditions. UNESCO's work has encouraged the development of hydrology and trained many people in the science. The benefits of that work however comes in the improvements in works based on the application of the science, often by the people trained by those trained by UNESCO direct beneficiaries, and often only realized by losses averted long after the hydrological research.

Another example illustrates both the difficulty in estimating the value of the program and its importance. UNESCO helped catalyze the development of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which not only has helped revolutionize man's understanding of the nature of matter, but provided employment for Tim Berners-Lee while he developed the technology which underlies the World Wide Web. It would be impossible to evaluate the value of the World Wide Web and it would be equally impossible to decide how much of that value to attribute to UNESCO's influence, yet my intuition suggests that even a few such huge successes can justify all of UNESCO's budget.

The United States' scientific community has been very influential in the development of this program, and several of its components resulted from U.S. initiatives. On the other hand, parts of the program such as Man and the Biosphere have been politically controversial in this country, and of course the precipitous departure of the United States from UNESCO and its 19 year absense had a deleterious affect on this as well as other UNESCO programs. (However, the U.S. scientific community continued its involvement during the hiatus, and the U.S. Government not only continued to observe the program but also provided funding for some of the U.S. scientific cooperation with UNESCO during the two decade absence.)

The discussion in class focused on the fact that this complex program is the result of a six-decade long process by which activities have been added to the Natural Science program by the General Conference of UNESCO acceding to the initiatives of member states and the general political climate of the time, as well as to the mandate of UNESCO. Were one to begin anew at this moment, with UNESCO's mission and budget in mind, one might well develop a different portfolio of activities.

We also discussed the decentralization of the program governance. In part this may be a response to the need to have science programs governed by peer scientists with profound knowledge and understanding of the specific scientific issues before them. In part, the introduction of many different governing bodies within the same program may be due to donors seeking to control the way that their funds are spent, rather than leave that control to the 193 member nation General Conference. It was noted that the natural science budget of UNESCO is primarily funded through voluntary contributions rather than from the regular budget derived from the assessed contributions of the member states.

The budget of the Natural Science Program is miniscule as compared with global spending on the natural sciences, even when all the extrabudgetary resources are considered. Moreover, the control over those resources is very fragmented and decentralized. The fundamental question that was addressed was whether this approach resulted in effectiveness as UNESCO seeks to promote natural sciences globally and to promote the use of the natural sciences to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men.

It was suggested that the parsimonious budget has benefits in forcing the secretariat to network and work through partnerships, while it was also suggested that a larger budget might be appropriate for the program.

The recent review of UNESCO's science program called for more central planning and management as well as more coordination among natural science subprograms and with the social and human science program. It was suggested in our seminar discussion that a large degree of decentralization of decision making for such a program is very desirable; however, there probably should be more central coordination of the very peripheral elements such as the Category 2 centers.

The seminar with eight students and two coordinators small enough to allow strong participation, and the discussion seemed to be both vigorous and interested.

More about the class...

Education for All

This weeks session of our seminar on UNESCO at George Washington University focused on the Education for All program, and UNESCO's role in its monitoring and coordination.

While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identified basic education as such a right, when the first EFA meeting was held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 few development professionals regarded the concept as more than a pipe dream, something beyond the realm of possibility. Today, 19 years later, even though the 2008 EFA status report said that the goals will not be reached by 2015, most development professionals not only feel that universal primary education is possible, but that it is within reach.

Unfortunately:

• the donor community has narrowed the scope of the efforts to focus on primary schooling rather than the more expansive concerns of lifelong learning promoted in the 1990's
• the quality of schools is dismal in far too many countries
• the financial crisis that is before us for the next few years makes it unlikely that the financial commitments of national governments or of donors will be met.

Still, the progress made in expanding basic education to reach hundreds of millions more kids is a great triumph for the world.

The Dick and Ray Show

Last week, Dick Arndt and Ray Wanner led our UNESCO class discussing the history of the organization and the role played by Americans in its founding, and in this country's withdrawal from UNESCO.

Frank Method, co-coordinator of the course
introduces Dick Arndt

Ray Wanner, having described the central role of the United States delegations in the creation of UNESCO and the important role of people from the United States in encouraging UNESCO to create some of its key programs, such as those of the World Heritage program and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, ended saying the United States has much to be proud of about UNESCO.

Ray Wanner checking his notes

I will allow myself to wonder whether the United States also has much to be ashamed of in its role with respect to UNESCO.

• The Organization functions under a complex governance system which sometimes hampers its efficiency and effectiveness. The United States delegates to UNESCO's planning and governing bodies bear more responsibility than most countries for UNESCO's governance structures and processes.
• The United States representatives to UNESCO and our Civil Society organizations have encouraged the Organization to embark on new and often ambitious undertakings. On the other hand, the U.S. Government has sought to limit the rate of growth of UNESCO's budget. The withdrawal of the United States and the U.K. created a financial crisis for UNESCO. Now UNESCO fails to play the ambitious role that its constitution and the majority of its members demand because its resources fail to meet its responsibilities.

I could go on, but perhaps the proper position is not to assign blame or credit, but to consider the role that UNESCO could play internationally, and helping it to achieve the excellence we require in assuming that role. There are remarkable successes within the UNESCO program such as the creation of CERN (which in turn hosted the creation of the World Wide Web) and the World Heritage network of protected cultural and natural sites. The creation of the SESAME project which is showing the way towards international cooperation in the Mid East or the work to create a global tsunami warning system may be equally valuable in the future. How do we make sure that UNESCO remains capable of such important initiatives?

John Daly
(The opinions expressed in this posting do not necessarily represent those of Americans for UNESCO.)

UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century

Mural in UNESCO Headquarters
Patrick Lagèsm © UNESCO

Yesterday I wrote an entry for my blog, Thoughts About K4D, about the complementary ways one can understand UNESCO, based on something I prepared for a seminar on UNESCO. Dmitry Epstein, the Think Macro blogger, posted a comment asking for updates on the course. I share my first response to that request.

The title of the seminar is "UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century" and I have posted the Syllabus online. I am coordinating the course with a colleague, Frank Method, and many members of the Board of Directors of Americans for UNESCO are participating during the semester.

The seminar is intended to provide students with an understanding of UNESCO and the context in which it works as an intergovernmental organization focusing on education, science, culture and communications and information. Students lead about half the sessions, and are expected to do a project for the course. In the two previous semesters that the seminar was offered, projects have included:

• The creation of a manual for students intending to start a UNESCO club in their university,
• The design of a museum exhibit on natural World Heritage sites and their conservation,
• A proposal for a multimedia self-learning course on the World Heritage sites in U.S. national parks, which has been accepted by the National Parks service, and
• A paper on UNESCO's role in the students home country which was accepted as the basis of a paper for an international conference.
  

This is the third time the course has been offered at George Washington University. It is a graduate seminar in the International Education Program. However, the seminar is open to students in other parts of the university and for cross registration for students in other universities of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. Indeed in previous semesters the class has been enriched by students of museum management and foreign affairs and by students from Georgetown university.

This semester there are ten students signed up. They are an impressive group. Most have lived abroad and have mastered more than one language, and almost all have some professional working experience. We have only had the orientation meeting so far, but I am looking forward to the semester.

John Daly