UNESCO Chief on the U.S. UNESCO Relationship

UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova on the evolution of the United States' relationship with UNESCO.

U.S. Candidacy for the UNESCO Executive Board

The United States is committed to supporting UNESCO in its mission, its priorities and its global objectives. It is the largest overall contributor to UNESCO, providing 22 percent of the organization's budget, but also makes significant extrabudgetary contributions for a variety of programs, including the World Heritage Committee, Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission, Creative Cities, and the International Institute for Educational Planning.

The United States believes it can it can play an important role in furthering UNESCO's goals and objectives through membership on its Executive Board. As a member of the Executive Board, the United States pledges to bolster quality learning for all, strengthen the role of science at UNESCO, empower youth as positive agents of change, encourage the development of independent and pluralistic media, and harness the power of cultural heritage and creative industries.

Learn more about the United States' platform for election to the Executive Board 2011-2015

UNESCO IN SPACE

A mini-satellite bearing the UNESCO logo is currently orbiting the earth. It was launched from the International Space Station (1SS) on August 3rd by Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Volkov in support of the UNESCO space education program.

The satellite, known variously as ARISSat-1, Radioskaf-B and KEDR or "Cedar", weighs 30 kg, measures 550 x 550 x 400 mm and was developed by amateurs, including secondary-school students in Russia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Find out more here.

UNESCO Seminar Begins Semester at GWU!

A graduate seminar on UNESCO has been offered at George Washington University since 2007. It has been coordinated by members of the Board of Directors of Americans for UNESCO until now, but this semester it is coordinated by Laura Engel, an assistant professor in the International Education Program. Members of the Board will continue to be strongly involved in the program as guest lecturers and as resource persons for the students.

The first class of the seminar was held this Wednesday, in Monroe Hall shown above.

The class was honored by a video welcome greeting by Irina Bokova, the Director General of UNESCO. In her remarks, she emphasized the importance of the class focus this semester on the educational and cultural programs of UNESCO. She expressed the hope that the course would help disseminate information about and understanding of UNESCO in the United States.

While the seminar is offered by the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, it is open to students from other schools in the university and to students from other universities in the Washington DC network of universities. If past experience is any guide, the seminar will be enriched by students from different disciplines and schools, as well as by foreign students working for an American graduate degree.

World Water Week

2012 World Water Week

26 - 31 August, 2012

Click here to switch to the videos of the closing ceremony, including a summary of the meeting.

The United States should nominate the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project for the Memory of the World Register

UNESCO established its Memory of the World Program in 1992. In doing so it recognized that much of the world's documentary heritage was in peril. The program seeks to facilitate the preservation of digital heritage, to make it accessible to all, and to increase awareness of significant documentary heritage. In this latter respect, UNESCO's Memory of the World Register was created to list documentary heritage of world significance and outstanding universal value.

Adding the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project to the Register would accomplish several things. First and foremost, it would increase the world's awareness of the rich heritage we possess in the archive relating to this remarkable woman. Americans know of Mrs. Roosevelt as the first lady during the Great Depression and World War II who served as the eyes and ears for her disabled husband, and as the foremost civil rights advocate of her time. The archive includes a rich source of information on that important time, a time in which the United States played a major role in world history. However, Mrs. Roosevelt was much more, perhaps the most famous woman in the world in her later life, she worked tirelessly to relieve poverty and promote human rights globally.

It is especially appropriate that UNESCO recognize the importance of Eleanor Roosevelt's contributions because she was a great supporter of the United Nations and of UNESCO. She served on the first delegation of the United States to the United Nations and chaired the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Recognition of the importance of this archive by UNESCO should help maintain the support that has been so critical to the gathering, maintenance and curation of this collection of written and recorded materials.

The inclusion of this project may also serve as a demonstration project within the Memory of the World Register of how such an archive can be protected while its content is being made more available to the public and while efforts are made to bring attention to the content and teach from its riches.

The project includes papers documenting Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and political career, comprising millions of pages of records stored in libraries and archives in all fifty states, and throughout the world, The Eleanor Roosevelt Project selects the material that most genuinely reflects her work and makes it available to everyone through the digital and print publication of five volumes that reproduce her most historically significant writings, and provides readers with all the background information they need to understand and interpret it for themselves.

The project efforts bore fruit in three highly-used, Web-based projects: an electronic “mini-edition” of ER’s correspondence with John F. Kennedy during the election of 1960; a Web curriculum entitled “Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt” that the National Park Service uses to interpret the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site at Val-Kill; and the online publication of all 8,112 My Day columns that ER wrote in her 26 years as a nationally syndicated columnist. These sites (www.gwu.edu/~erpapers) receive roughly 1.2 million hits a year.

Since launching Eleanor Roosevelt on the Web, the project focus expanded to take greater account of the significant audio-visual record that ER left behind and for which the Internet furnishes an ideal means of communication. Few people know that in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, ER addressed the nation before her husband did—an event that the project highlights in a film produced for students, teachers, and the general public.

Preview: Eleanor Roosevelt's Use of Media



CSPAN has produced two long videos on Eleanor Roosevelt and the archives containing her papers at George Washington University. Click on the title below to transfer to CSPAN where you can play the corresponding streaming video.

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media
November 13, 2010

C‑SPAN visited the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University to learn about the longest serving First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt used newspaper columns, radio, speaking tours, books, and television to communicate her ideas.

American Artifacts: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Politics
Sunday, December 26, 2010

C‑SPAN visited George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project to learn more about the politics, controversies, and media savvy of the former First Lady from Project Director Allida Black. Mrs. Roosevelt, First Lady from 1933-1945, published 8,000 columns, 580 articles, 27 books, 100,000 letters, 1000 speeches, and appeared on 300 radio and television shows.

John Daly
The ideas presented in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Americans for UNESCO. 

An indicator of interest in UNESCO

Source: Google Trends

The upper graph shown above shows the relative frequency with which the word "UNESCO" has been used as a search term in Google. The graph indicates a yearly cycle, with a drop in interest in UNESCO in the summer and in December. It also shows a drop in interest over the six and a half year period shown.

The lower graph indicates that the volume of references to UNESCO in Google indexed news has increased over time.

The points on the graph identified by letter above show that there was an increase in Google searches when new sites were added to the World Heritage list, when UNESCO deleted Dresden from that list due to construction which was seen to detract from its historical and scenic value, and when Irina Bokova was elected Director General of the Organization. There is an especially important meeting of the Executive Board of UNESCO followed by a General Conference of member nations every other year, in the fall. It appears that these event were marked by an increase in interest in UNESCO not only in 2009 when DG Bokova was elected, but also in 2007 and 2005.

Call for Papers - 1st World Humanities Forum

On the theme of “Universalism in a multicultural world”, the 1st World Humanities Forum will take place in Busan, Republic of Korea, from 24 to 26 November 2011, to facilitate collective reflection by human scientists, thinkers, and visionaries with regard to key challenges and questions facing the world in the 21st century.

The World Humanities Forum aims to:

• Reflect on key challenges and questions facing humans today from the perspectives of human sciences;
• Examine the status of human sciences in the context of such challenges and questions; and,
• Promote the importance of the role of human sciences and the reflection on humanism in addressing challenges and questions.

Download the Call for papers [PDF, 43 KB].

Abstracts must be submitted by August 31st, 2011.

THE INGLEHART-WELZEL

 CULTURAL MAP OF THE WORLD

Source

Water in Cities

UNESCO's Priorities for the XXI Century

Much Belated Congratulations to the UC Irvine and University of Arizona

In 2007, UNESCO) named the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at UC Irvine and the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Sustainability of Semi-arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHRA) at the University of Arizona joint winners of the 2007 Great Man-Made River International Water Prize.

The prize recognizes outstanding achievements and contributions in advancing the assessment, development, management and use of water resources in arid and semi-arid areas, such as ground and surface water availability and usage in areas subject to drought and desertification.

The two centers were recognized “for their action in strengthening the capacity to manage the water resources of arid and semi-arid areas around the globe through a network of international and regional cooperation.”

Multiple openings, UNESCO (France, The Netherlands, Italy)

The University of Washington Department of Earth and Space Sciences has posted several jobs in UNESCO or UNESCO Centers on its blog:

• Director and Secretary of the International Hydrological Programme – Paris, France
• Deputy Secretary – Division of Water Science, Paris, France
• Vice-Rector, Academic and Student Affairs – UNESCO-IHE Institute of Water Educaton, Delft, The Netherlands
• SDU Coordinator – Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit, Trieste, Italy

Online Archive of UNESCO News by Google News

Google Frequency Plot of News References to UNESCO

Google News Archives provides a historical record of news dealing with UNESCO from its files. Note that the frequency of news stories was high in its early years, decreased during the late 1950s and 1960s (the period of decolonization in which many new nations joined the Organization. There was an increase in news related to UNESCO in the late 1970s, when the New International Information Order debate was hot in the United Nations, and in the mid 1980s, about the time that the United States and the United Kingdom withdrew from the organization. The archive contains fairly large numbers of news stories in recent years.

If you go to this site, you can actually view stories from the archives, learning about UNESCO's history for yourself.

Interview with Hans d'Orville, UNESCO ADG for Strategic Planning

Hans d'Orville recorded this message with the UNESCO Institute for Water Education discussing that organization and its fit in the larger program of UNESCO.

Editorial: UNESCO should support capacity building needed to better assure the ethical conduct of research

UNESCO has a program on the ethics of science and technology. Let me suggest that that program undertake a major effort to improve the ethical conduct of research, especially through support for capacity building in developing nations. Some of the issues that merit high priority are:

• Misconduct in science, including such concerns as plagarism and fraudulent practices
• Assurance that the peoples exposed to risks inherent in risks are also representative of the potential beneficiaries of the research if it is successful
• Ethical treatment of researchers, laboratory workers and other people assisting in the research
• Ethical conduct with respect to human subjects involved in the research (this has several distinct elements which are treated differently, such as patients in biomedical research, subjects in psychological or social science research, subjects involved in online research. Cultural norms are different in different societies as to who should provide the consent, how to inform the consent giver, and the ethical responsibility to specific populations such as prisoners, military personnel and mental patients.
• Ethical conduct of the treatment of laboratory animals. Again, there are often different regulations for the treatment of non-human primates, caged mammals, livestock, fish, etc.
• Ethical conduct of the treatment of wild animals that are research subjects, such as those involved in catch and release programs.
• Ethical conduct with respect to the containment of materials involved in research. This is an especially complex area, including the containment of human, animal and plant pathogens, containment of exogenous species, containment of radiological materials, containment of recombinant and synthetic organisms. The issues are different with respect to the shipment, especially international shipment of materials, laboratory use of materials, and field release of materials.
• Appropriate treatment of environmental issues, such as assurance that endangered species will not be further endangered and there will be no other environmental problems caused as a result of the research
• Ethical issues related to the funding of research including preparation of proposals, there (peer) review, and the allocation of funds
• Ethical issues in the reporting of research, including the publication of results
• Ethical issue in the treatment of intellectual property arising from research
• Ethical issues in the conduct of research in different institutional settings, such as government laboratories, universities, corporations, foundations, and non-governmental organizations.
• Ethical conduct of research in multinational teams and by researchers working in countries other than their own

Those who have never worked in a research laboratory may not recognize how dangerous such a place may be. In the half dozen years in which I worked in an industrial laboratory, a couple of people were hospitalized due to a laboratory accident (one for many months), there was a release of toxic gases that killed livestock near one of the lab facilities, another of my colleagues was suffering from radiation sickness as a result of a previous laboratory accident, and when its nozzle broke a torpedo shaped tank of gas flew through wall after wall separating the different labs. As a research manager I had responsibility for epidemiological research programs in which research subjects died. I worked with very distinguished people who early in their careers were involved in the Nazi research lab in Peenemunde and in the Tuskegee Syphilis study. I take the ethical conduct of research very seriously, especially since the credibility of the scientific community is crucial to the utility of its work.

What can UNESCO do in this field? I would suggest that it can do many things, and often do them better than bilateral agencies of development banks:

• It can bring together experts from different cultures to discuss and debate such as those described above in order to clarify common ethical positions and those issues on which reasonable people can differ.
• It can provide an observatory, allowing science policy workers to easily access information on the systems that have been put in place around the world to assure the ethical conduct of research.
• It can convene meetings of science policy workers from countries seeking to collaborate in multinational research projects to discuss how their various concerns can all be met in such projects/
• It can identify expert consultants who can advise developing country science policy workers and institutions as to how they might build the capacity of their own organizational mechanisms to assure the ethical conduct of research.
• It can establish criteria and indicators that nations can utilize to measure their success in assuring the ethical conduct of research, and it can advise science policy workers as to how to do so in such a way that they can effectively compare their success with that of other nations.
• It can promote the development of training programs, especially international training programs such as those provided by UNESCO Category II Centers, on the ethical conduct of research.

As new fields of science come to the fore, so do new ethical issues. Thus the development of recombinant DNA led to issues with respect to the containment of recombinant organisms. The patenting of genes discovered in research also raised novel ethical issues. Thus, even the most developed national scientific institutions periodically must face new ethical issues. Perhaps more important, the detection of ethical problems regularly result in efforts to strengthen institutions assuring ethical behavior in order to prevent their recurrence. In the case of less developed nations, as new areas of research are first undertaken there arise new needs for institutional development to assure ethical action.

Other UN agencies and programs have interests in the ethical conduct of research. Thus, the World Health Organization has interests in helping its member nations assure the ethical conduct of biomedical research, the Food and Agriculture Organization with the ethical conduct of agricultural research, and the United Nations Environmental Program with that of environmental research. However, UNESCO given its wide responsibility for science and the long history of its program in the ethics of science and technology appears especially suited to work with science policy agencies in its member nations in order to build the ethical aspects of their national research institutions.

John Daly

The ideas expressed in this posting are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Americans for UNESCO.

Editorial: The Importance of UNESCO's Social Science Program is not Recognized

The August 5th issue of Science magazine has an editorial by Kenneth Prewitt, the President of the Consortium of Social Science Associations. It begins:

Last month, a U.S. congressional committee wisely decided not to cut funding of social science research by the National Science Foundation (NSF), despite an attack that cleverly framed the discipline as “good, just not good enough for NSF.” This claim was rebutted across the political spectrum, by physical and biological as well as social scientists, and in the business sector.

UNESCO has both a natural science program and a social and human science program. Americans would, I suppose, tend to assume that the latter program included psychology and cognitive science as "human science" in addition to the social sciences such as anthropology, economics, political science and sociology. In fact, the program has a broadly conceived effort in the social sciences studying social transitions, but also emphasizes programs focusing on the ethics of science and technology, human rights and sport. (UNESCO once had a broader interest in history as a discipline, but currently is focusing on African history and that of the Slave Trade; these efforts are managed within the Culture Sector of the Organization.)

Of course, I strongly support UNESCO's programs in the natural sciences. I continue to be surprised and concerned that UNESCO which is the flagship organization of the UN system for education and communications does not have a strong program in psychology nor in cognitive science. But, this post is focused on the social sciences per se.

UNESCO as a whole is strongly focused on promotion of peace (and a culture of peace), on sustainable development especially of the least developed countries, Africa and small island states, on gender equality, with concerns for HIV/AIDS, for policy making and for foresight and anticipation. All of these areas depend on a strong basis of knowledge and understanding from the social sciences for effective action. More importantly, UNESCO is the logical place in the UN system for the lead in the promotion of social science capacity building, especially in developing nations, and for the linkage of social science knowledge and understanding in national policy making and institution building. Moreover, UNESCO has an ability as a neutral agent to communicate knowledge from the social sciences and to strengthen social science capacities that complements that of bilateral donors and international financial institutions. Yet the resources devoted by the Organization to social sciences are tiny, especially as compared to the challenges faced by the program and the member nations of UNESCO.

Of course, there has been a long term concern related to the efficiency and effectiveness of UNESCO. In part, the concern is based on the fact that UNESCO has so many responsibilities and so few resources that it is all but impossible to carry out all its programs well. It would be fatuous to propose increasing funding for UNESCO's social science program without increasing staffing for the program, and unrealistic to suggest increasing that staffing by diverting staff positions from other, often successful programs that are also challenged as they try to do a great deal with a few people.

Still, as UNESCO makes progress in strengthening management and improving effectiveness and efficiency, I would strongly suggest it recognize the importance of the social sciences to its mission and strengthen its social science resources and program.

John Daly
The opinions in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for UNESCO.

Photos from the Facebook UNESCO Albumon the occasion of the Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples

Rethinking Development: Ethics and Social Inclusion

A two-day conference, “Rethinking Development: Ethics and Social Inclusion," is to be held in Mexico City, August 17 and 18, 2011. Organized by UNESCO and the Government of Mexico, the conference will bring together 25 experts to look at ways of moving beyond purely economic and technical approaches to development towards more democratic, environmentally sustainable, socially just and culturally pluralistic societies. More specifically, it is also to provide a framework for reflection in academic, activist and policy communities.

The conference is to help set an agenda for UNESCO’s thinking and action in the decisive period for the international community that will run from the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development to the expiry in 2015 of the Millennium Development Goals commitment period. It will also, more broadly, provide a framework for reflection in academic, activist and policy communities.

The conference will be opened by a formal introduction by Pilar Álvarez-Laso, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences.

The conference is open to the public, subject to prior registration. To register, you may contact Ricardo Guerrero, Tel: (52-55) 3601-1650, r.guerrero@unesco.org.

For further information on the content and objectives of the conference, or on UNESCO’s activities in ethics, you may contact Josepha Montana, j.montana@unesco.org.

Cooperation between UNESCO water resource centers in the United States and the Dominican Republic

UNESCO has designated 66 international and regional institutes and centers as Category II Institutes and Centers, under the auspices of UNESCO. Nominated by member nations, these institutes and centers are recognized by UNESCO for their contributions to the achievement of UNESCO’s strategic program objectives and program priorities and themes. Supported directly by member states, these institutes and centers are not legally part of the Organization, but are associated with it through formal arrangements approved by the UNESCO General Conference.


The International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM) was established by the U.S. Army Institute for Water Resources (IWR) in 2007 in collaboration with U.S. institutions and organizations sharing an interest in the advancement of the science and practice of integrated water resources management (IWRM) around the globe. It was formalized as a UNESCO category 2 water center in October 2009 with the signing of an agreement between the U.S. Government and UNESCO. It is the first such center in the United States.

Bob Pietrowsky, Director of IWR (right)
 and Frank Rodríguez, Executive Director of INDRHI (left)
sign the memorandum of understanding

Earlier this summer on June 30, Bob Pietrowsky, Director of the IWR, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Frank Rodriguez of the Instituto Nacional de Recursos Hidraulicos (INDRHI) of the Dominican Republic. The MOU facilitates cooperation between the UNESCO ICIWaRM Category II center hosted by the IWR in Alexandria, VA and the Centro para la Gestion Sostenible de los Recursos Hidricos en los Estados Insulares del Caribe (The Center for the Sustainable Management of Hydorlogical Resources in the Island States of the Caribbean (CEHICA), also a UNESCO Category II Center) hosted by INDRHI.

Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development

As UNESCO undertakes a new engineering initiative you may wish to review the major report on world engineering introduced in the World Engineers Convention in 2008 and published in 2009.

Read:

• The background of the report
• The report leaflet summarizing the report's content
• The report -- Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development

Reorganization of the Natural Sciences Sector of UNESCO

Gretchen Kalonji, the Assistant Director General of UNESCO leading the Natural Science Sector has announced a reorganization.

The Sector staff will be grouped in three main divisions:

• Water Sciences
• Ecological and Earth Sciences
• Science Policy and Capacity Building

"The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) will maintain the degree of autonomy it has enjoyed to date, while making every effort to further enhance its contribution to the work of the sector. It will continue to be served by its own Assistant Director-General, as well as by separate Executive and Administrative units."

There will be four cross cutting thematic units:

• Natural Disasters
• Biodiversity
• Science Education and
• a "UNESCO Engineering Initiative"

In addition to the four cross-cutting themes listed above, the Natural Sciences Sector will continue to play lead roles in two of the UNESCO-wide intersectoral platforms:

• UNESCO contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and 
• UNESCO’s contribution to the Mauritius Strategy for Small Island Developing States.

Read more about the reorganization and its objectives.