Institute of Development Studies

The UN is where it’s at – at least this week

Sir Richard Jolly - 23 September 2009

With President Obama chairing a session of the Security Council and more than a hundred heads of state converging on New York, the UN is indeed ‘where it's at'. Those who see the UN as little more than a talking shop, may be inclined to think that this is little more than the photo opportunity of the week. They would be wrong.

Four-fifths of the UN's ongoing activities involve work in developing countries, far away from New York. These include support for development, women, children, peacekeeping and environmental priorities, not only climate change but national actions in other areas such as re-forestation and protection of biodiversity. With the support of assessed and voluntary contributions, the UN spends some $20 billion a year on these activities, much in the poorest and least developed countries.

The UN's ongoing contributions to policy and thinking about development are almost totally under the radar of public and media awareness. Last week, the Secretary General launched UN Ideas that Changed the World, the summary volume of a ten-year independent exploration of the UN's intellectual contributions in the economic and social arena.

In a remarkable but barely noticed way the UN's has steadily concentrated human rights, women's empowerment, development goals, fairer international economic relations and environmentally sustainable development. It has changed the context of thinking and concerns in which governments and people operate in countries round the world.

There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. The brilliance of the UN is that it has often been ahead of the curve, a lone international voice promoting progressive ideas long before they have won political or general acceptance. Yet by sticking with them - as with human rights, gender equality or climate change - the UN has shifted ideas and understanding, with the result that ideas long treated as impractical or unwise have found their place at the table.

Such ideas are not abstract concepts but often calls for action. In 1966, the World Health Organization after seven years of debate, decided on a global campaign to eradicate smallpox within ten years. In spite of opposition from the doubters and budget worriers, the campaign went ahead. By 1977, the incidence of small pox was down from millions a year to one last case in Somalia, All the contacts were rapidly vaccinated and the disease died out. The dread scourge which for thousands of years had been killing and pock-marking millions of people each year had been eradicated. Ever year since, the world has been saving a billion dollars or more -30 years of savings while the ten year cost of the campaign was $300 million, the price at the time of three fighter bombers. UN idealists hope that this may be the way with nuclear disarmament.

Smallpox is only one of many successes, in health, in setting goals for education, in providing support for a whole range of development actions, including development goals and strategies. The very statistics used to measure global economic progress arose from the UN's pioneering statistical work in the 1950s,developing a handbook of best practice and then encouraging all countries to use it to develop systems of national accounting on a comparable basis. The Sarkozy Commission which last week showed how GNP has been too narrow a measure of progress and proposed including measures of well-being were following in the footsteps of what the UN's Human Development Report had called for twenty years ago.

As the Secretary General put it last week, 'Finding ... ideas and making them work for the benefit of all humankind has been and should be a central mission of the United Nations.'

Richard Jolly is Honorary Professor and Research Associate at IDS and co-author of UN Ideas That Changed The World, published by Indiana University Press

Image: UN Photo/Joao Araujo Pinto