Quite apart from the pantheon in clown shoes for whom ending UN funding is always worth a punt, the global financial crisis has shaken the foundations of the money pit upon which the UN was built. (Although to be fair, it wasn’t a particularly big money pit.) One unforeseen effect of the crisis has been the problematic overvaluation of the Swiss Franc as investors tried to move their money someplace safe. In Geneva this week, I heard whispered stories about how UN agencies are planning to move staff out of Geneva because the cost of living is so high, and there’s running commentary on WHO’s adventures in downsizing.
But hey! We work in a sector where every crisis is also an opportunity (poor translation ahoy), so perhaps this is an opportunity to redesign the UN, to eliminate the problems it suffers from and maybe even make it relevant again. Ask yourself the question, what might the UN look like if you devised it for the world we actually live in? The UN has accreted so many layers that such a restructuring will never happen, since the system will collapse before it reforms in any significant way. If we were playing Fantasy Palais des Nations, however, here’s what I would like the humanitarian elements of the UN to look like:
- All operational work should be stripped from the agencies. Generally they’re just not that good at it, and would be more effective if they focused on advisory services, policy development, advocacy campaigns, and possibly capacity building. “No operations” should be built into their mandates in order to prevent the mission creep that has crippled them over the years.
- Funding responsibility should also be stripped. As well as costing money on administrative costs and exchange rate losses, it’s an extra layer of bureaucracy that clogs up the works. The only argument that can be made for the UN controlling funding is that this enables better coordination, but the evidence suggests that anybody making this argument is delusional.
- Break down each agency into functional units comprised of small clusters of specialist staff. These staff would be distributed around the world through virtual office technology, with only small centralised headquarter offices for basic management of these teams and coordination of activities such as advocacy. Lean and mean is the way to go.
- These staff would then deploy only in situations where their specialist expertise is required, preventing the clusterf*ck you get when every section of every agency tries to get its foot in the office door in a big disasters. These staff would work within other organisations – civilian and military, government and non-government, donor and recipient – and be project-focused.
- When not deployed, UN staff would act as critical nodes in a global network of humanitarian actors that would all contribute to policy development on a more equal footing. This would create flexible and iterative processes, instead of the sclerotic nonsense that the IASC has to go through every time it wants to issue a proclamation about how many mickle makes a muckle.
- Operational work would be done by anybody who was capable, funded through bilateral funding on a country basis, possibly through donor secretariats, especially in conflict areas. Since NGOs and other actors already do most of the heavy lifting, this would be a direct contract scheme, with UN nodes playing an advisory role on grants approval and possibly implementation.
- WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING:
