OpenScienceDirectory

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has recently joined forces with Hasselt University Library, Belgium, and the IODE (International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange) programme of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC) to develop a global Open Science Directory.

About 13000 scientific journals are now available in the 'Open Science Directory'. When all the special program journals will be included, the Open Science Directory will contain more than 20000 titles.

Read more about the UNESCO Initiative!

Editors comment: This initiative is illustrative of a fact about UNESCO, It is often difficult to discover important initiatives carried out under UNESCO's sponsorship. The IODE is a decentralized program of the IOC, which has its own governance body, and thus the Open Science Directory, which was created with two cooperating agencies, is difficult to find from the UNESCO website. Yet an initiative which allows one to find 20,000 online journals is important for all scientists, and especially for scientists in developing nations, where printed journals are often not accessible or available. JAD

Musing: UNESCO's Agenda for the 21st Century

Monday's class on UNESCO, focusing on the changes for the future, was very thought provoking. There was general agreement, I believe, that in the coming decades there will be forces that require major changes in UNESCO. If UNESCO does not reinvent itself to make itself more efficient, more effective, and more relevant to the emerging needs of the international system, it may well become irrelevant or even go out of existence. Not only is a reengineering of UNESCO's structure and processes needed, but so too is a restructuring of its relations with the governments of member states and the intellectual communities of educators, scientists and cultural leaders in those states that UNESCO was created to serve.

UNESCO not only is headquartered in Paris, the majority of its employees are there. It was suggested that, as the UN agencies are all concentrated in rich countries, they are seen by the majority of the world's population (which lives in poor countries or emerging economies) as tools of the rich isolated from the interests and concerns of the poor. As part of its reinvention, UNESCO will have to reach out and involve many more people in its work. Indeed, it would be well advised to reach out to make itself known to the majority of the world's population.

In its sixty some years of existence, UNESCO has had some major successes. USAID has been characterized as spinning off its successes in order to concentrate on its failures. Whether that is or is not true, surely UNESCO should emphasize and build upon its successes. These would include the networking of World Heritage sites and of bioreserves, the collaborations UNESCO has catelyzed through its intergovernmental science programs, and development of networks of international laws and agreements through its standards setting instruments in the fields of culture and education.

It was suggested that the governments of rich countries now see UNESCO as irrelevant to their domestic interests, and that UNESCO should seek seriously to again become something valued for its ability to serve its major financial donors domestic interests in education, science and culture.

There is a huge management challenge for UNESCO's management.

• Management should find ways to clean out the dead wood, eliminating programs that don't work, that duplicate those of other agencies, or that would be better implemented by other agencies.
• Management should find ways to either spin off subsidiary organizations that are able to go it alone, and decentralize management of subsidiary organizations that are peripheral to UNESCO's core business, allowing the secretariat and governing bodies to focus their attention narrowly on that core business.
• Management should find ways adopt programmatic innovations that allow it both to respond to changing international needs and demands on the organization and simultaneously to focus on its core values and mission.

While some innovative programs may arise from the secretariat, the history of the organization suggests that the most important innovations have come from outside. Thus UNESCO's roles in Education for All and the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals arose out of the consensus developed in international meetings, while the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Program and the World Heritage Program arose from initiatives of the U.S. delegation, influenced by leaders in the U.S. scientific and environmental communities. UNESCO can play a key role building on its great power to convene leadership from government, education, science and culture and its bureaucratic power and outreach, but it needs to continue to innovate successfully to remain and gain in relevance.

In order for UNESCO to rise to these challenges, it needs a very strong secretariat and leadership. Director General Matsuura will complete his second term of office in a few years, and it is very important that the community of nations select a strong, effective leader to replace him. Many of the senior staff of UNESCO are nearing mandatory retirement age in the United Nations system, and therefore UNESCO will have to restaff by replacing many professionals. One suggestion is that the organization might move toward a system like that of the U.S. National Science Foundation, bringing in senior professional on a rotating basis. A cadre of senior people rotating through UNESCO for three to five year terms might help it to rethink its operations and reinvent itself.

The current governance structure of UNESCO will make major reform, reengineering and restructuring difficult at best. Not only is it expensive, it is unwieldy. When UNESCO was created, the number of nation states was relatively small and the strong Director General could deal effectively with its representatives. In the intervening years, the size of the governing bodies has grown with the number of member states. Moreover, the participation of leaders from the intellectual community has been replaced in governance by representatives of the diplomatic missions of the member states. The long meetings of UNESCO's 193 member state delegations every other year at the General Conference deal with so large an agenda as to overwhelm most delegations' capacities to absorb and analyze information. The Executive Board, now with more members than the original General Conference, is similarly cumbersome and overloaded. The Executive Board and General Conference take up a great deal of the attention of UNESCO's senior staff. Thus, reform of governance seems a precondition to rebuilding and reforming the organizations, and reinventing its programs and ways of carrying out those programs.

It seems clear that the United States must take a leadership role in the reinvention of UNESCO; the United States contributes 22 percent of UNESCO's assessed budget, and the United States has the world's strongest educational, scientific and cultural communities, as well as being a world leader in information and communications. It is important that the United States assume this leadership role, especially because this nation must reemphasize "soft diplomacy" and UNESCO can and should be a key element in America's soft diplomacy. To assume that leadership role, the State Department needs a very strong staff dealing with UNESCO affairs, the U.S. National Commission has to be given a stronger role not only in advising the government but in the governance of UNESCO, and State and the National Commission needs to reach out more effectively to involve the American intellectual community in their and UNESCO's efforts.

Musings: The Importance of UNESCO

UNESCO is chartered with huge responsibilities, but shackled with a small budget -- on the order of US$300 million per year. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has lead responsibilities in the United Nations system for there areas, and also for communications and information.

Compare UNESCO's budget for its world wide responsibilities with some U.S. entities. My county's school system, for example, has an operating budget of some $2 billion per year plus an investment budget of some $230 million a year. The U.S. Federal Government spends $116 billion per year on research and development, and of course that is only part of what is spent on R&D in the country, and the expenditures on science include not only research and development but many other scientific functions as well. The global market value of cultural and creative industries (producing and distributing such goods and services such as books, CDs, videogames and sculptures) has been estimated at US$ 1.3 trillion and is rapidly expanding; between 1994 and 2002, international trade in cultural goods increased from US$38 billion to US$60 billion. The United States -- with a population of over 400 million, and per capita GDP of $43,500 -- spent 8.8 percent of GDP on information and communications technology in 2005.
As the above graph shows, the number of intergovernmental organizations exploded in the last half of the 20th century. UNESCO is now one of thousands of such organizations. We tend to lose track of the work and impacts of individual intergovernmental organizations in the mass of such organizations. So too, we tend to assume that these organizations with relatively small budgets also have relatively limited impact.

In the case of UNESCO, I would suggest that the impact has been quite significant:

Education

The community of nations has embarked on an ambitious program to provide Education for All, and includes ambitious educational goals within the Millennium Development Goals. UNESCO's function over the years has been to keep international attention on education, and on the need to work to assure people's human rights to education. In the current situation, it has worked to help assure that educational statistics are comparable among countries, and provides forums where national governments have to defend their educational performance before both their own citizens and other nations. It is likely that global educational achievements are much greater than they would be had there not been a United Nations body to do that which UNESCO does in education.

Science

In its early years, UNESCO's influence was critically important in the creation of the International Center for Theoretical Physics and the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN); these organizations have helped both to illuminate the nature of the universe and to spread modern physics worldwide. The role of CERN in the creation of the World Wide Web might alone justify UNESCO's existence.

The role of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Science Committees has been quite important. In oceanography, UNESCO has helped the scientific community to work in ways transcending national borders, and is working to develop tsunami warning systems to serve all of the world at risk from tsunami disasters. The hydrology program is allowing collaborative work to characterize water resources, and helping to create a knowledge base that can be trusted in negotiation on control and allocation of water resources. The Man in the Biosphere program has resulted in a collaborative structure of hundreds of bioreserves, where mankind is learning how to protect the biospere.

Culture

UNESCO's World Heritage Center has recognized more than 800 natural and cultural sites that are so important that they can be fairly called the heritage of all mankind. For each, the country in which the site is located has produced a detailed study of the site and a plan for its protection. Monitoring of the state of those sites encourages countries to work hard to achieve that protection, and over the history of the program only one country has withdrawn a single site from the network.

UNESCO has also catalized the creation of a body of international conventions that protect cultural property. Since the protection of Abu Simbelm UNESCO has provided a system that helps to protect cultural heritage during emergencies and wars, and helps to regulate international trade to prevent the trade in stolen artifacts and other cultural property.

Communications

UNESCO provides a mechanism for the United Nations to militate for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Every time a reporter is killed or imprisoned anywhere in the world, UNESCO protests and in so doing draws public attention to the event.

UNESCO also serves the United Nations system to promote libraries, to support a culture of the book, and more recently to promote the development of digital information serving the countries on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Why is UNESCO Important to the United States?

The points above are made to illustrate that UNESCO is important to the community of nations. To our State Department, which concerns itself primarily with security and economic issues, those services may not be convincing. Of course, U.S. foreign policy is also concerned with supporting the international humanitarian programs desired by the American public, and UNESCO's programs in Africa are prototypical of the multilateral approach to development assistance.

UNESCO was created to promote the international cooperation of national intellectual communities -- educatoral, scientistific and cultural. Indeed these communities in the United States value the contacts with their peers abroad, and expect the foreign policy apparatus of government to facilitate that networking. UNESCO is, in realizing these aspirations, an important element of foreign policy.

The State Department is increasingly recognizing the importance of "soft diplomacy" as a necessary complement to the "hard diplomacy" focusing on economic and military power. The United States needs to restore the confidence of other nations that this country will negotiate in good faith, with understanding and respect for the positions of others, and UNESCO provides a useful forum for that purpose.

As Archibald McLeish, the writer and Librarian of Congress, so memorably said in the negotiations leading up to the creation of UNESCO, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we must begin to build the defenses of peace." Building those defenses is a long term process, and it is one best accomplished by the community of nations working together. Thus UNESCO, with its work with education and with the intellectual communities of the nations of the world, should be a significant element in U.S. soft diplomacy.

Musing About the Future of UNESCO

Last night we held a panel discussion in our graduate class on UNESCO. The class focused on UNESCO's future in the 21st century. The discussion focused on how UNESCO could adapt to the changes that will surely occur over the next 40 years or so.

Coincidentally, I have been reading Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, Carl J. Schramm. The authors focus on innovation as the basis of economic success of nations. For advanced developed nations, working at the forefront of technology and having relatively high costs of labor, companies must invent, not only innovate by copying. The authors also realize that most invention comes from individual entrepreneurs and small firms. However, they note that it is large firms that have the resources to take an invention and develop it into a widely used, high quality, reliable product. Successful large firms not only continue to innovate by acquiring and building on ideas from outside (and occasionally inventing from within(, they also get rid of activities by decentralizing management, selling off divisions, or closing down things which are no longer profitable.

Perhaps UNESCO, with its 2000 people can take the successful commercial firm of a comparable size and learn from their approach. It seems clear that would be better served by a sharper focus. Many of its most successful programs have their own oversight bodies and receive most of their financing from other sources, not UNESCO. Perhaps a process of formally either turning activities into independent agencies, or of decentralizing by delegation of full authority to the staff and directors of some of these activities might help. This sounds easy, but in fact is very difficult. The management of the reengineering and restructuring of relations in downsizing processes requires great leadership if it is to be done well.

UNESCO often finds innovations thrust upon them -- new standards setting documents, new centers, new programs. Some of the best programs were started in this way. Russel Train was the motive force behind the invention of the World Heritage program, which the secretariat carried to success, as Roger Revell and a few other scientists were the originators of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Committee, which UNESCO also made a success. Indeed, even in the cases of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals, UNESCO took on tasks developed outside and ran with them. Again, the management of innovation in a large, complex organization is also very demanding of skills and time.

UNESCO needs very good management to select among all the innovations suggested each year those which are really practical and important, those which fit with UNESCO's mandate and capabilities, and those which UNESCO can do well. It also needs good management to decide which of its current activities not to do, and to make the best, most appropriate arrangements for their termination or decentralization.

John Daly

UNESCO Destroys 100,000: Director General Launches Investigation

Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson write in The Washington Post (April 13, 2008):

For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.

Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.

"This is the intellectual organization of the United Nations system," Aziza Bennani, Morocco's ambassador to UNESCO, said in an interview. "How could an employee of UNESCO make a decision to destroy these books?"

Homero Aridjis, Mexico's ambassador, said at the organization's executive council meeting this week, "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO." He demanded an internal investigation.

UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.

The article also states:

According to the report, the destruction occurred in 2004 and 2005, when UNESCO's overflowing book storage warehouses in Paris were relocated to Brussels. Rather than pay to move 94,500 books, auditors reported, UNESCO officials ordered them destroyed. The books were turned to pulp for recycling, the audit says.

Nino Muñoz Gomez, director of UNESCO's Bureau of Public Information and chief of the publishing division, said that at least half of the destroyed volumes were outdated and contained obsolete statistical data.

The audit notes that some publications were out of date but says others "on historical or purely literary themes (poetry anthologies, stories from all lands in translation) were not at all affected by obsolescence." It says a "solution other than destruction" should have been considered, "such as free distribution to libraries.".....

Because too many books often were ordered and others were never distributed properly, tens of thousands piled up in UNESCO's storage facilities at a cost of about $100,000 a year, until the agency decided to shift distribution functions to a Brussels company and move its stocks there.

Muñoz Gomez, who assumed his post in April 2005 and was chief of the publishing section for nine months while the book destruction was taking place, said he did not learn of it until early 2006, when a new employee showed him thousands of dollars in bills for the pulping.

He said he authorized payment of those bills "of several thousand euros each" but did not realize the magnitude of the operation. "All we knew is the bills were sent by the company and we had to pay the bills," he said in an interview.

Read the full Washington Post article.

Read the Director General's comments on the situation.


"He who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself …"
John Milton (downloaded from a UNESCO website)

Within the Frame of UNESCO Major Program II - Natural Sciences, UNESCO's Regional Bureau for Science and Culture in Europe (BRESCE) set priority action in:

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: CAPACITY-BUILDING & MANAGEMENT

Devoted to the follow-up to the World Conference on Science (Budapest 1999) with respect to the elaboration of national S&T policies and related legislation for promoting human resources and institutional development in science and technology in developing countries and countries in transition; strengthening science education; improving university teaching, enhancing national research capacities and reinforcing regional and international co-operation in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, the biotechnologies and the engineering sciences.

SCIENCES, ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Science in support of environment and sustainable development. The concept and value of integrated management of vital resources and the environment is a priority. Close relation with the five environment and development related programs (IGCP, IHP, IOC, MAB and MOST).

Telephone Conference of the U.S. National Commission For UNESCO

The U.S. National Commission for UNESCO will meet by conference call on Wednesday, April 23, at 11a.m. The meeting of this advisory committee will last until approximately 12:00 p.m., and the call is open to the public.

The U.S. National Commission for UNESCO was asked to provide recommendations on a proposal received to establish a UNESCO Chair. For more information about the Program see http://www.state.gov/p/io/unesco/c14222.htm. The call will also be an opportunity to provide an update on recent and upcoming UNESCO and U.S. National Commission for UNESCO activities.

For more information on this conference call, or to participate in it, please contact the Executive Secretariat of the National Commission at 202-663-0026.

World Press Freedom Prize awarded to Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

2008 Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize awarded to Mexican reporter Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, the recipient of this year's UNESCO Press Freedom Award, is a freelance reporter based in Cancun, Mexico. Joe Thloloe, President of the jury of 14 professional journalists and editors from all over the world, and Press Ombudsman of the Press Council of South Africa, explained the choice of this year’s laureate:

“Members of the jury were impressed by the courage of Lydia Cacho Ribeiro as she continues to expose political corruption, organized crime and domestic violence in the face of death threats, an attempt on her life and legal battles. For me, a journalist who knows the antagonistic environment in which he or she operates and continues to do the right thing by keeping readers, listeners or viewers informed about their society deserves recognition for their contribution to freedom of expression around the world. Lydia Cacho is such a laureate.”

Read More!

Editorial: The United States Positions At UNESCO

What should be the United States position with respect to UNESCO as we enter the 21st Century?

UNESCO seeks to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men. It seeks to promote international cooperation among the intellectual communities of its member states, It is the lead agency for the United Nations in education, science, culture and communications. It describes itself as a laboratory of ideas, as a standard setter, as a clearing house, as a builder of capacity in Member States and as a catalyst for international cooperation.

The United States cooperated in the creation of UNESCO, with post World War II leaders seeing it as important to a variety of U.S. foreign policy interests. It withdrew from UNESCO in 1984 when -- due to UNESCO's bureaucratic inefficiencies and to some areas in which the majority of governments opposed the positions of the United States -- a later administration concluded that UNESCO no longer was a cost-effective vehicle for achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives. In 2002, following improvements in the operations and efficiency of UNESCO and changes in aspects of UNESCO's policies and programs, the United States government decided to rejoin the Organization.

U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives

The dominant foreign policy objectives of the United States are assuring the security and economic health of the nation. Humanitarian concerns are also important, realized through provision of relief to the victims of disaster and provision of foreign assistance for the alleviation of poverty. There are increasing concerns for global problems, such as protecting the health of the nation from global epidemics, protection of the global environment, and protection of World Heritage from the threats that arise from globalization.

The State Department has also maintained a program of cultural diplomacy, which has been under-appreciated. Cultural diplomacy has the potential to help bridge the cultural divides between the people of the United States and the peoples of other nations, tand indeed to prepare U.S. government officials to deal with people from other cultures.

It is also important that the U.S. builds support for and reduces resistance to its own diplomatic priorities. Importantly, diplomats engage in give and take in international fora, supporting the priorities of other nations and building alliances.

UNESCO's Potential Importance to U.S. Diplomacy

UNESCO's efforts to promote peace through appropriate education programs, and its ability to promote better understanding among people of different cultures are increasingly important to U.S. security, as indeed is UNESCO's ability as a neutral party to allow the global scientific community to reach consensus on issues such as the location and availability of water resources or the appropriate management of ocean resources.

UNESCO's leadership of the global Education for All program, its intergovernmental scientific programs, its World Heritage program, and its network of conventions governing cultural property are additional examples of highly cost- effective vehicles for the United States by which UNESCO is achieving objectives of U.S. foreign policy as well as objectives of many other member states.

UNESCO can serve as a neutral venue for discussions between the United States and other nations. In some cases those discussions are important in themselves and in others they are important in building confidence for later negotiations. Similarly, it serves as a venue in which other countries can meet, advancing peace processes and cultural understanding in ways that are indirectly important to the United States.

UNESCO offers a vehicle to help network U.S. educations, scientists and cultural leaders with their counterparts in other nations. Such networking is important in achieving a number of foreign policy objectives, and indeed is so valued by the U.S. communities involved that it is itself an increasingly important objective in terms of service to the public.

Priorities

As a result of the 18 year absence of the United States from UNESCO membership, the immediate concern is to reestablish U.S. influence in the governance of UNESCO while seeking changes in policy and programs that further advance U.S. foreign polity interests.

Another immediate priority is reacquainting the U.S. communities with UNESCO, and increasing the involvement of leaders of those communities in the work of UNESCO. In this respect, the U.S. National Commission could again be an important instrument as it was in the distant past.

Of course, the United States is interested in UNESCO's ability to work effectively and efficiently. UNESCO will not be an useful vehicle for achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives if it is allowed to be ineffective or inefficient in carrying out its constitutionally assigned mission. Thus the U.S. should use its influence in the governing bodies of UNESCO to assure it is well led and efficiently run.

UNESCO's most important objectives have not been met in six decades of its existence, and will not be quickly met in the future. Every U.S. administration seeks to have results to show in four or eight years. The U.S. should be willing, given the modest size of the UNESCO budget, to give priority to those long term efforts likely to contribute most to peace and prosperity in a livable environment.

Perhaps the most important priority might be to fully incorporate UNESCO as an instrument of U.S. cultural diplomacy, encouraging the organization to promote cultural development in its member states. UNESCO quite properly follows the mandate of its member states to protect and promote cultural diversity. Globalization often results in pressures driving cultural changes which are unpleasant to the members of the changing cultures and indeed sometimes immoral or unethical to the majority of the people.

This is not to say that cultural change itself is unacceptable, but rather that the directions and processes of cultural change must be more acceptable. While the world's cultures are hugely diverse, there is wide agreement among nations on universal rights of man. Consequently, there is likely to be wide agreement that cultural changes are acceptable when they help to assure that people within a culture can more fully achieve those rights. Indeed, it is clear that cultural development is important for achieving peace, for assuring that peoples rights to a decent life, and indeed for assuring freedom of expression and freedom from coercion.

Thus U.S. cultural diplomacy should seek to encourage UNESCO to promote processes which engage the members of the cultures of the world to embrace those changes which will help them to more fully achieve the rights of their members which all nations have agreed to be universal rights.

John Daly
The ideas expressed in this posting are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent those of Americans for UNESCO or any other organization.

Editorial: UNESCO Needs to be Reinvented for the 21st Century

UNESCO still reflects the management systems of the time it was created in the aftermath of World War II. It is time to reorganize UNESCO, taking into account the advances in organizational design made possible by the Information Revolution, and prepare UNESCO for the challenges of the 21st Century.

UNESCO should focus on International Networks. It should decentralize, outsource back office functions, conduct much more of its activity via the Internet, focus far more on its core functions, and spin off functions that distract it governors and leaders from those core functions.

Why UNESCO Is the Way It Is

When UNESCO was founded, transportation was far less developed than it is today; there was no commercial jet air travel, and the international air travel system was rudimentary. People in developed nations listened to the radio, but the transistor radio had not yet been invented and much of the world was even out of radio broadcast range. Television was an invention waiting for a market. Making an international phone call was a lengthly and expensive undertaking. The intellectual communities that UNESCO was designed to serve were concentrated in a couple of score of rich countries, and got their information from print media.

There were few intergovernmental organizations in existence before the 1940s, and thus few models that UNESCO could copy. The most applicable was probably the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation with its 40 national committees, and the founders of UNESCO did indeed draw heavily on that experience. However, at that time the dominant organizational form used by government and corporations was hierarchical with a central headquarters and dependent field offices. There were few international corporations in today's sense of that term, and even fewer that emphasized knowledge services.

Not surprisingly then, UNESCO was created with a highly centralized bureaucracy (in Paris), and depended heavily on publication in the print media for its information products. Its founders rejected a French proposal that the national delegations to UNESCO be tripartite, with representatives of the National Commissions and Civil Society as well as government; government was given full control. National Commissions were, however, included in the UNESCO constitution both to advise their governments and to serve as channels of communication between UNESCO and the educational, scientific and cultural communities within the member states.

With decolonization and the epoch of development assistance, UNESCO had to reorganize to some degree in order to carry out its development assistance mission. Similarly, as the network of intergovernmental organizations exploded to include thousands of such organizations, and as governments became more familiar with the concepts of intergovernmental organizations and organized to deal with them on a regular basis, many of the successful UNESCO programs were restructured to have governance shared between UNESCO and their own intergovernmental governance committees. Similarly, many decentralized centers and Institutes came into being, and many have governance structures that respond to UNESCO and to their external donors.

21st Century Management

The Information Revolution has led to major changes in management theory. The hierarchical organization of the 20th century was an effective way to manage national systems that were created to achieve economies of scale in production of goods and services and to distribute products via the elaborating transportation infrastructure to national markets. Companies grew by vertical integration of productive and distribution activities, and later by aggregation of different enterprises into conglomerates. Since intra-organizational information systems were at the time more efficient in coordinating the disparate operations of production and distribution than were markets, large organizations were created.

In the 21st century, e-commerce has come to demonstrate that market processes can be more efficient that intra-organizational ones. Business to business e-commerce is growing, and corporations are focusing more on core competencies, buying the inputs needed for those competencies in one set of markets, and selling their products in another set of markets. Indeed, back office functions, once thought to be core functions of any organization, are not only being outsourced, but are being outsourced from developed to developing countries to achieve economic efficiencies. Similarly, we find government to business e-institutions being developed as well as business to customer e-commerce thriving in businesses such as eBay, Amazon, and Dell. e-government is increasingly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government to citizen transactions.

Mass communication has developed greatly in the later part of the 20th century, so that most people obtain more information from electronic than from print media. Moreover, the Internet has resulted in point to point communication being as cheap as mass media communication. The World Wide Web is a far more efficient way for UNESCO to interact with the global community that are paper books and periodicals. Indeed, with the development of community radio and satellite communications, it is possible to reach many of even the most isolated communities with up-to-the-minute information.

While it is far more feasible for people to travel to and from Paris than in the past, video conferencing is an increasingly useful approach to face-to-face communications among people who live in widely separated places; video and audio streaming via the Internet can make the proceedings of such conferences cheaply available to a global audience, with each member tuning in from his or her home or office at a time he or she finds most convenient. Thus Internet mediated dialog is likely to increasingly substitute and complement in-person meetings.

Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia of Life illustrate that new Internet based technologies can substitute for earlier management-intensive approaches to the development of bodies of reliable information, and moreover can result in those bodies of information being more current than would be possible with traditional approaches.

Social networking, which probably began with the scientific community in the United States via email and inter-networking, and expanded to include online depositories of scientific papers, has exploded with the growth of Facebook, Linkedin, and other social networking platforms. Today the scientific community continues to gather at large scientific meetings and to disseminate information through peer-reviewed paper journals, but a far richer and more timely networking is taking place over the Internet.

Implications for UNESCO

Studies of governmental organizations that have successfully embarked on e-government efforts have suggested that the process goes through several stages, each of which subsumes and builds upon the previous stages:

1. The establishment of a presence on the Internet.
2. The provision of information via the Internet.
3. The conduct of transactions via the Internet.
4. The ultimate restructuring and reorganization of functions and processes to utilize the Internet.

UNESCO has already accomplished stages one and two, and is conducting some transactions via the Internet. It is now time for the organization to undertake the completion of the process of restructuring and reorganizing to fully utilize the potential provided in the new Global Information Infrastructure. It should revamp its publication policies, reinvent its websites, and build a global information network to be far more effective in the provision of information to the global community. It not only should be far more proactive in moving its transactions to the Global Information Infrastructure, but it should also find ways to dis-intermediate the international communications among the national intellectual communities that it serves.

Most importantly, it should begin to undertake the re-engineering of its structure and processes, and the restructuring of the institutions that form its interface with the governments of its member states, with civil society organizations, and with the global and national intellectual communities it was born to serve.

John Daly
The opinions expressed in this posting are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for UNESCO or any other organization.

Editorial: Towards a UNESCO World Forum

UNESCO should begin program of international conferences, involving intellectual leaders from all over the world, under the title of The UNESCO World Forum. The World Economic Forum involves political and business leaders to focus on global issues. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has expanded from its original focus on three fields, and can now be described as an annual event in which the world's leading thinkers gather to to find inspiration. The UNESCO World Forum would be an intellectual complement to these series.

This editorial suggests the creation of a forum that draws among the world's foremost intellectuals for discussions to determine the priority to be given by the global community of nations to the major issues of the day and of the century, and to address how those issues might best be addressed by the peoples of the world.

The major trends of our time are the increasing capacity of mankind to effect physical changes and the increasing intellectual capacity of mankind. Since the reconstruction after World War II, when priorities were clearly to prevent future world wars and to reconstruct the damage that had been inflicted by the first and second world wars, the agenda of the community of nations has expanded to include the protection of human rights, nation building, the reduction of poverty in all of its aspects, culturally sensitive management of the ever-more-rapid process of social change and the safeguarding of cultural heritage and diversity, and the protection of the environment. Unfortunately, mankind has failed to develop the wisdom with which to apply its increasing capacities to deal effectively with this agenda.

The UNESCO World Forum would draw on educational, scientific and cultural leaders of the world to meet together and to discuss and debate. It would encompass some of the functions of UNESCO's World Philosophy Forum, and of the Dialog Among Civilizations, being more inclusive than the former in its participants, and more inclusive than the latter in expanding beyond the focus on peace. Educators would be included, not only because of the intellectual power of academia, but because they bring a special understanding of how to build the solutions to global problems starting in the minds of men. Leaders from science and technology would be needed because of their in depth knowledge of mankind's problems and resources, and the technologies that can be brought to bear to apply those resources to the resolution of those problems. Cultural leaders, especially from the arts and humanities, would be included for their broad and integrating perspectives.

Historical Antecedents

The League of Nations system, having failed to prevent World War II, was replaced by the United Nations System, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as an independent organization tapping into the intellectual communities in its member nations.

One of the key antecedent organizations was the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, which formed a secretariat for the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, which had enlisted such luminaries as Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Béla Bartók, Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray and Paul Valery. Some 40 national committees on intellectual cooperation were created linking to the International Committee, including an active one in the United States. "Numerous conferences and symposia were held under the auspices of the International Institute in Paris. Among the topics taken up by these conferences as the world situation became more menacing were the psychological causes of war and methods of promoting peaceful change as a substitute for war."

Vincenzo Pavone points out that there has been a long term tension between a global model of UNESCO which emphasized its role in the long term solution of global problems and an intergovernmental model that focused on intergovernmental cooperation in the attack of relatively immediate problems. That tension was present at the creation of UNESCO, when the model of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation was counterposed with the proposals of the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) for a massive effort to rebuild the educational infrastructure of Europe and to deal with the massive physical and mental impact of World War II on Europe's children. It reflects, to some degree, the tension between the pragmatism of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian cultures versus the Latin Cultures of France and Latin America.

The greatest successes of UNESCO have probably been in programs that exemplify the intergovernmental cooperation model, such as UNESCO's leadership in Education for All, the World Heritage Program, the Intergovernmental Scientific Programs, and the development of the legal instruments which establish an intergovernmental system for the protection of cultural heritage and diversity. Yet the impact of UNESCO in its sixty years seeking to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men should not be underestimated.

Yet the balance has swung heavily to the intergovernmental model. The Executive Board, which once included members chosen for their intellectual star quality, now consists of representatives of governments elected by the General Conference (and of course the permanent delegates to UNESCO are diplomats named by the governments they represent.)

UNESCO was created at the time that the atom bombs were dropped by the United States on Japan; the world had been given a vivid illustration of the power to move from scientific abstraction to terrifyingly powerful technology. It is not surprising that the founders of UNESCO saw the need to leaven science with humanism. As science has become more powerful in the six decades of UNESCO's existence, the need for a consilience of knowledge, a synthesis of the knowledge of man's different communities. Unfortunately, UNESCO in accommodating its bureaucratic realities, still tends to stovepipe its educational, scientific and cultural programs. The proposed UNESCO Global Forum would be a giant step away from reductionism towards consilience.

The proposed UNESCO World Forum would seek not to draw representatives uniformly from the member nations, but from UNESCO's constituent educational, scientific and cultural communities. It would seek rather representation from different cultures and civilizations rather than from nation states.

The proposed UNESCO World Forum is not intended to detract from UNESCO's critically important efforts to promote intergovernmental cooperation in priority educational, scientific and cultural areas. Indeed, it would be best accomplished by an increase in UNESCO's already severely strained budget and staff capabilities.

Conclusion

The UNESCO World Forum is proposed to complement the pragmatic intergovernmental efforts of UNESCO by drawing on the world's intellectual leaders to address the world's agenda of long term issues, drawing on UNESCO's experience as a laboratory and clearinghouse of ideas.

John Daly
The ideas expressed in this posting are mine alone, and do not represent those of Americans for UNESCO or any other organization.

Women scientists celebrated in new charter

Nearly forty past Laureates of the L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Awards met recently in Paris to sign the Charter of Commitment “For Women in Science,” the first charter designed to promote science, support the cause of women, and change the face of science in the world.

The L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Charter “For Women in Science”

This Charter marks the 10 years of the L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Awards For Women in Science. In signing the document, Award Laureates commit themselves to:

• Act as a role model to inspire future generations
• Transmit passion for scientific research
• Encourage women scientists to act as agents of change
• Strengthen and support scientific research on all continents
• Foster creativity and innovation
• Advocate for diversity and gender equity
• Build sustainable networks for women scientists
• Participate as women scientists in public policy decision making
• Shape attitudes to change the face of science
• Promote science as a source of progress

Read more!

The 2008 L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for North America was announced at the meeting. It went to Professor Elizabeth BLACKBURN (Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, USA) “For the discovery of the nature and maintenance of chromosome ends and their roles in cancer and aging.”

New Edition of the UNESCO Courier

Poster© Mark Bakker (The Netherlands)
IYPE student contest
Planet Hot-Spot

Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, encourages us to change our lifestyle to minimize our ecological footprint, the new measuring unit invented by Mathis Wackernackel, also included in this issue.

How can we “manage the unavoidable to avoid the unmanageable”, according to Italian climatologist Filippo Giorgi’s formula, is the question raised by this issue of the Courier, devoted to the International Year of Planet Earth.

Read The UNESCO Courier

A World of Science - April-June 2008

UNESCO has published the April-June edition of the flagship publication from its science programs.

Editorial – Don’t miss the boat!

There is a date which should be in the diary of every country with a coastline: 13 May 2009. This is the deadline for countries wishing to submit a claim for the extension of their legal continental shelf.

What future for geo-education in Africa?

Africa is a continent rich in minerals, oil, coal, gas and other geological resources. With global market prices for many raw materials escalating, geology is attracting greater attention from policy-makers. The question is: will the education system in many African countries be able to rise to the challenge?

Inteview – ‘The rice farmer need no longer sustain heavy losses in times of drought’

To mark the 10th anniversary of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science, we talk to Khady Nani Dramé, who is using her research fellowship to cross drought-resistant African rice with the more productive Asian rice. Through her research at the Africa Rice Centre in Benin, Dr Dramé hopes to reduce Africa’s dependence on rice imports.

Horizons

The art of engineering a better world

A solar tunnel fruit-dryer system to supplement the income of Indian fruit farmers, a system for recycling olive oil waste in the Palestinian Territories, retrofitting of homes in Nepal to make them earthquake-proof and a bridge that comes in a kit for Rwanda’s rivers; these are just some of the 31 student projects rewarded in December by the Mondialogo Engineering Awards.

A bad year for Caribbean corals

In 2005, unusually warm waters in the Caribbean caused the worst coral bleaching in recorded history. It was also a record year for hurricanes in the Caribbean. With global warming, years like 2005 are destined to become more common in future.

To read A World in Science on line click here!

Video: UNESCO building peace in the minds of men

UNESCO considers education, science, social science, culture and communication as the means to achieve the ambitious objective of its founding charter: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”

UNESCO has created a wonderful video, which is only 12 minutes long, to describe its origins and its work. You can see it on your own computer via streaming video.

Click here to go to the website for the video!

The New Edition of The UNESCO Courier is Out

British writer Doris Lessing returns to her country of birth, Zimbabwe, and denounces our jaded world. Franco-Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo explains how travels can morph into exile. Spôjmaï Zariâb tells the story of war torn Afghanistan, from her Paris vantage point. Michal Govrin, from Israel, reveals the impassioned dimension of an unending conflict. In the United States, Indian author Kiran Desai questions the fate of belonging to two cultures. Argentine poet María Medrano builds a bridge between the free world and incarceration. All are women between two shores.

© Laurent Giorgetti
"In between" is how these women define themselves.

U.S. PRIORITIES IN UNESCO

Laura Bush, Honorary Ambassador for the United Nations' Literacy Decade and a passionate promoter of literacy in the United States, looks forward to working with UNESCO to build strong education programs in each member country. (AP/WWP)

The U.S. State Department provides a website describing its view of U.S. priorities in UNESCO.

Go to that website!

World Water Day 2008

Sorry, I was not feeling well, and missed World Water Day for 2008, which fell this year on March 22.

Go to the UNESCO website for World Water Day 2008.

The international observance of World Water Day is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro.

Go to the World Water Day website.

McBride and the New World Information Order

It occurred to me on St. Patrick's Day that I might tell you a little about the McBride Report. it was one of the items identified as a cause of the U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO in the 1980s. Sean McBride was from perhaps Ireland's most famous family, and is one of ten Nobel Prize laureates from that island. Yet his name is also associated, incorrectly, with the U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO. Here is the story.

In 1974, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for a New World Information Order. During the 1970's the United Nations was also the site of debates on a New International Economic Order. Both efforts can be seen as related to decolonization and the rise of power of the newly independent states in intergovernmental affairs, as well as their belief that new international orders were required in justice to repair the legacies of poverty and undedevelopment that remained from colonialism.

In 1976, UNESCO’s Director General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow -- following up the UN resolution, with the approval of the General Conference -- appointed a distinguished committee headed by Sean McBride to report back to UNESCO on the international communications and information order. Given that, with leadership from the United States, communication and information had been included as the "other C" in UNESCO's charter, this was not only reasonable but almost necessary. The committee worked over several years, and submitted its report in time for the UNESCO general conference of 1980, and it was sent on to the member nations for their attention. That report, titled Many Voices, One World, has been increasingly seen as a useful and prescient view of the need to give voice to poor people in poor nations.

The discussion of communications and information at the General Conference was not limited to the recommendations of the McBride Report. The delegates of the emerging developing nations had developed their own elaborate set of recommendations, and the United States and other delegations from developed nations opposed many of the specifics. At last a resolution was adopted by consensus, although the UK delegation stated that they would have opposed it on a vote.

One authority states that the Belgrade declaration affirmed that UNESCO should play a major role in the examination and solution of problems in this domain. "The assembly also agreed on a number of guidelines for the new information order:

1. elimination of the imbalances and inequalities which characterize the present solution;

2. elimination of the negative effects of certain monopolies, public or private, and excessive concentrations;

3. removal of the internal and external obstacles to a free flow and wider and better balanced dissemination of information and ideas;

4. plurality of sources and channels of information;

5. freedom of the press and information;

6. the freedom of journalists . . . a freedom inseparable from responsibility;

7. the capacity of developing countries to achieve improvement of their own situations, notably by providing their own equipment, by training their personnel, by improving their infrastructures and by making their information and communication means suitable to their needs and aspirations;

8. the sincere will of developed countries to help them attain these objectives;

9. respect for each people’s cultural identity and the right of each nation to inform the world public about its interests, its aspirations and its social and cultural values."

The General Conference of UNESCO in 1980 as always conducted a full agenda of business on the organization's educational, scientific and cultural programs. However, the press in the United States covered little but the discussion of the New World Information Order. While the U.S. Delegation report on the General Conference was not especially negative about the NWIO, the issues continued to draw attention from the members of the press media. (Editor's note: I have always suspected that the media objected not only to their perception that UNESCO was enabling state control of media in countries with coercive governments, but that the international press services were also concerned that the call for pluralism which might diminish their oligopoly control of world news. JAD)

UNESCO had been drawing negative comment from other segments of the American Public, especially among conservatives, starting from its creation. The idea of a global forum for discussions between East and West, North and South was not universally accepted during the Cold War. Perhaps the low point in suspicion of UNESCO came during the McCarthy era when seven Americans were forced out of UNESCO's International Civil Service due to allegations of Communist sympathies.

Some Americans had been concerned about the potential impacts of UNESCO educational efforts on American schools. Others had been concerned by the anti-Israeli sentiment expressed by many Arab and developing nations in its fora. Indeed, there remains a segment of the American public that expresses concern about UNESCO's drawing global attention to America's World Heritage sites and biosphere reserves.

UNESCO then as today had a huge mandate and a limited budget. It had been subjected to pressures to improve efficiency, as it is still. There also seemed to be a real cultural divide between Amadou M'Bow, the African Director General, and officials of the conservative Reagan administration. In any case, the combination of factors proved too much, and Elliot Abrams, then Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, announced in 1981 that the United States would withdraw from UNESCO. (Editor's Note: Yes, the same Elliot Abrams who was convicted in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation; he is also the well known neoconservative who is currently Deputy National Security Advisor in the Bush White House, and who appears to have been deeply involved in the decisions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more generally in Middle Eastern affairs during all of the Bush administration. JAD)

Unfortunately, the old disagreements about the New International Information Order have been unfairly linked in the literature to Sean McBride's name. The McBride Report produced in 1980 is still available on the World Wide Web. In its honor, McBride's name has been given to the The MacBride Round Table on Communication. Had its importance been more fully recognized by the Reagan administration, the Report could have helped the world better respond to the Information Revolution, as well as better respond for a need for information services that would better contribute to international development and poverty alleviation.

The old controversy can little diminish Sean McBride's career as Ireland's most distinguished jurist, as one of the people most responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as one of the people responsible for Amnesty International. In the United States he is now perhaps best known for the McBride Principles that helped bring the international pressures in support of the peace process in Northern Ireland and for his critically important efforts to end apartheid in southern Africa.

Read more about Sean McBride

Read more about the McBride Report.

Editorial: The U.S. National Commission for UNESCO

The decentralized agencies of the United Nations System have their own governance. The form of that governance varies from agency to agency. For example, the International Labor Organization has a system in which government, industry and labor are represented from each member nation. UNESCO is unique in that its constitution calls for each member nation to create a national body for the purpose of associating its principal bodies interested in educational, scientific and cultural matters with the work of the Organisation. That element of the constitution was negotiated among the founding nations at the creation of the organization, with strong support from the United States delegation, and has continued in force for six decades.

Read more about the U.S. National Commission.

The UNESCO constitution leaves to each member nation the decision of how best to involve its intellectual communities in its own national commission, but specifically calls for national commissions to serve as advisory bodies to their governments. With the reentry of the United States into UNESCO, the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO was reestablished and chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The State Department has indeed used the National Commission to provide advice.

Some years ago, Bruce Smith wrote a book (The Advisors) about government advisory committees. One of its most memorable statements was that advisory committees are most effective when the person receiving the advice actually wants that advice and has requested it. That is a most reasonable suggestion. Indeed, most federal advisory committees are created by the agencies that they advise, and the FACA has sunset provisions so that committees created by one official do not live on to bother later officials who do not want their advice.

An exception, however, is where the Congress designates by law that the administration must have an advisory committee, as the Congress has done with the National Commission for UNESCO. In such cases, the existence of the independent advisory committees can be regarded in part as one of the of the checks and balances established in the U.S. system of government. In such cases, the administration is required to obtain and listen to advice whether its political officials want that advice or not.

In most federal advisory committees, the Executive Branch selects the members. The FACA requires that they do so in a fair and impartial manner, but the choice is left to the administration in power. In the case of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, however, the enabling legislation is unique in that it calls for 60 of the 100 members to be named by non-governmental organizations. Indeed, it calls on the National Commission itself to periodically review and, if deemed advisable, revise the list of such organizations designating representatives in order to achieve a desirable rotation among organizations represented.

Thus the Congress in exercising its oversight responsibilities over the Executive Branch has required the Department of State to seek advice from the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and indeed has established a mechanism by which that Commission itself can assure the representative appointment of the majority of its members.

The FACA, passed into law long after the legislative authority for the National Commission was in place, recognizes that in some cases the provisions it creates for advisory committees in general will need to be adjusted to meet those imposed by laws establishing specific advisory committees; it grants authority to the White House to make such adjustments of its provisions as may be required in the FACA-mandated charters of the individual advisory committees.

When the new administration takes office in 2009, it should revise the charter of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO to assure that the Commission fulfills the roles envisioned in the UNESCO Constitution (and by reference in the National Commission's authorizing legislation). The new administration should convene a special session of the National Commission to revise the list of non-governmental organizations with rights to name members to the National Commission. It should revise the member of the National Commission accordingly. Having done so, the new administration should actively seek and utilize the advice of the Commission in its dealings with UNESCO.

Indeed, more generally, the new administration should return to earlier practices, utilizing the National Commission much more actively as a vehicle for informing the public about UNESCO and to improve liaison among the U.S. educational, scientific and cultural communities, UNESCO's programs, and the National Commissions of other Nations.

John Daly
(The opinions expressed above are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for UNESCO.)