An Exercise on UNESCO Governance

Irina Bokova, the new UNESCO Director General

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

By UNESCO governance I mean

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

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

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

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

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

The nine candidates for UNESCO Chief

and the Chair of the Executive Board

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

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

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

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

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

The Executive Board in session.

UNESCO Symposium Offered for 4th Time

Students doing presentation on the UNESCO culture program

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

Students attending to the presentation

Class: The Final Session

The final session of our seminar on UNESCO at George Washington University was devoted to the students sharing descriptions of their class projects. I thought the projects ranged from very good to wonderful. I will not identify the titles of the projects and their authors to protect student privacy.

The students are asked to submit a brief project proposal at mid semester, and get written faculty feedback from that submission. Most meet with one of the faculty for an hour or two to discuss the project, usually narrowing the scope. We make an effort to assure that each student takes on a UNESCO related project that really interests her/him, and ideally that ties into their work or their career plans. While most projects take the form of an academic paper, they also take the form of project proposals, website designs, manuals, and one in the past was even the plan for a museum exhibition. Most students work alone, but in some cases students work on a joint project.

I admit my thinking about the projects has evolved over time. Certainly each project provides its author with an opportunity to go into depth about a facet of UNESCO. If we succeed in the student's selecting a project in which she/he is really interested and has some relevant background, the experience should be more fun and the product better. I also like for projects to produce useful outputs -- why have that much work go into something that is read only once. We try to get students to think about the methods for producing a project, to think about the audience for their project results, and especially to get away from secondary sources and to actually talk to (interview) people who have practical experience; these are practices that will serve them well in the future. Since most of the students in this course will not be career academics, the project gives them the opportunity to develop a product that will be typical of their professional work product with the supervision of an experienced professional.

The overall design of the course

Since this is the last in the series of postings on the course, I will take the opportunity to reflect a little more on its design.

The nominal objective of the course is to teach students about UNESCO, an organization that is likely to be important to their future careers, and about the way in which the United States relates to UNESCO. For that purpose we seek to combine information about the history of the organization, its programs, its organization, its governance, its staffing, and its processes. Fortunately we have access to people trained in history who have studied UNESCO's history specifically and who have long personal experience with the organization, and they provide a couple of lectures early in the semester.

The students present a half dozen classes, each focusing on a program or subprogram of UNESCO. Together these cover almost all of UNESCO's programs. We started to do this feeling that the students would learn more in preparing their presentations, and that they would better communicate the information that they had accumulated to their fellow students. We discovered that the students are mostly professional teachers and that they are better at teaching than most university faculty and most of our guest faculty. The classroom performance ranges from good to truly outstanding.

I try to help the students to build tools for understanding large, international organizations that will generalize from UNESCO to other organizations with which they may work or interact in the future.

We also scheduled two role playing exercises this semester. The idea in part was to help the students to understand the way in which UNESCO works as a forum for international discussion, and the perception was that by playing the roles they would internalize better the complexity of both the issues being addressed and the processes by which negotiations take place in an international setting.

We were fortunate enough to have a retired senior diplomat come in and share his experience with the oversight of U.S. representation to UNESCO. In addition to the nominal content of the class, this provided an opportunity for the students to get to know and interact with a career professional diplomat. Indeed, during the semester we probably averaged three senior professionals in the classroom for each class. Remember, the roots of the words "professional" and "profess" are related, and I feel there is something important to be gained by giving students the opportunity to interact with really experienced professionals in their chosen fields.

A couple of the classes were specific future exercises, in keeping with the title of the course, "UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century." The exercises also help the students to think prospectively and not just retrospectively, and to address the nature of the organization from still another perspective.

We found the seminar format to be useful, in large part because we had a small class (nine students) who were thoughtful and articulate. It was interesting to see the degree to which the class discussion was driven by a couple of students who were outgoing and inquisitive. I suspect that sharing discussion with fellow students encouraged thoughtful construction of questions and follow-ups.

All and all, I think the class was a success. We will find out more when we get the feedback from the student evaluations.

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

The UNESCO Headquarters illuminated
© UNESCO/N. Guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esther Brimmer

Recently confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State
for International Organizations

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

Michael Southwick (and Frank Method)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out:

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

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

Class Exercise: ExBrd Working Group on Old City of Jerusalem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We reviewed the actual Resolution that had been approved

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

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

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

Comments on the UNESCO Culture Program

The Hudhud Chants of the Ifugao

©Renato S. Rastrollo / NCCA -ICH /UNESCO

Following the class last week on the World Heritage Center, students this week presented a class on the remainder of the Culture program of UNESCO. That program has helped to prevent illegal traffic in cultural artifacts such as art and archaeological objects, to protect artifacts during conflict and to repatriate artifacts that have been illegally removed from their rightful place. Perhaps the most important aspect of the convention is that it has made museums and dealers more careful about handling such objects; having helped dry up the demand for such goods, the convention has reduced the incentives for those who would remove cultural objects from their legitimate homes.

More recently an emphasis has been added on intangible cultural heritage. This enabled the students to show a clip from the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity website. Much of the UNESCO coverage of these intangible aspects of culture is focused on things which seem picturesque to our graduate students, and indeed would seem so to most people who might read this blog.

The students discussed the fact that American culture also distinguishes us from other nations, including the culture of our institutions of higher education. Americans are known internationally not only for its popular culture (movies, television, music) but also for an ideology based on belief in free markets and democracy, the remains of its frontier culture, church attendance, and emphasis on civil society.

It was pointed out that not all aspects of cultural heritage are worthy of being maintained. America has a heritage of slavery, racism and prejudice which many people feel must be overcome. Indeed, UNESCO's efforts to foster a culture of peace recognize that some cultural changes are to be desired. Thus the efforts to protect intangible culture must be seen as empowering peoples more fully to choose the cultural changes that they will foster.

There was also a discussion of the efforts of UNESCO to protect threatened languages, including demonstration of the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Again, there was a recognition that living languages change and develop, but that there are thousands of languages used by only small populations that may eventually die out, with a loss of the oral heritage that they convey.

The discussion recognized that UNESCO does recognize the role of culture in development, and especially seeks to help nations to recognize the appropriate role for policies protecting cultural diversity within their development policy portfolio. In this respect, UNESCO has a program fostering cultural industries (such as music, art and crafts), and of course UNESCO has an important role in international copyright law and protection.

Both the presenters and the audience found the materials so interesting that time grew short, and there was little time to discuss all of the cultural activities, Thus the discussion of the Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage had to be cut too short to adequately introduce that important topic. (Did you know that sea level has risen 100 feet since the height of the last ice age, and that as a result it has been very difficult to investigate the hypothesis that an important route for human migration to the Americas was down the coasts in the final stages of the ice age.)

All in all a stimulating topic and discussion!

Comments on the Budget of UNESCO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNESCO's World Heritage Center

A world heritage site
Photo: Ian Britton via FreeFoto.com

There was a good presentation and discussion last night in our UNESCO course on the World Heritage Center and its program. We also enjoyed the participation of Ray Wanner, an expert on the World Heritage Program, as a resource person.

The program has been called UNESCO's flagship and it is perhaps the best known of UNESCO's activities. With 876 world heritage sites in 145 countries, and 186 countries as signatories to the World Heritage Convention, almost everyone has visited a world heritage site. On the other hand, most people harbor serious misconceptions about the program.

The program was created by the World Heritage Convention, which went into force in 1975. However it was created on the basis of earlier efforts.

When the Aswan Dam was built, Abu Simbel would have been flooded. This extraordinary temple, carved out of solid rock with huge statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II, was too important to lose. In the 1960's, with the leadership of UNESCO the temple was ripped out of the rock and moved to higher ground. This effort proved that UNESCO could play a catalytic role in the protection of world heritage sites.

UNESCO had been involved in the earlier creation of two important bodies for the preservation of cultural objects:

• ICCROM: The International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property
• ICOMOS: International Council on Monuments and Sites

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had been created in 1948. When in the 1960's the United States proposed a World Heritage Convention which would provide for the protection of cultural and natural site of such importance as to form part of the heritage of all mankind, these organizations were in place to provide the expertise to evaluate the importance of proposed sites and the adequacy of the proposed plans for their protection.

While there are economic advantages, such as the promotion of sustainable tourism -- as well as pride of place -- in having a world heritage site, countries participate in the World Heritage Convention primarily to safeguard the common heritage of mankind.

Countries are responsible for inventorying their domestic sites worthy of world heritage designation, and proposing them for inclusion on the world heritage list. Such a proposal involves not only a defense of the importance of the site, but also a plan for its maintenance. The World Heritage Center has proposed sites and plans reviewed by the appropriate technical body, and proposals are approved, deferred or rejected by its governing body on the basis of the expert review. A list is also maintained of World Heritage Sites in Danger; one site has been removed from the World Heritage List after it had become too degraded to retain the world heritage status.

The World Heritage Center, with a secretariat of 80 people, has its own governing body, an elected subset of the member nations of UNESCO. It has a budget of some $11 million per year, of which only about $3 million comes from the assessed contributions of UNESCO member states. The budget (small in the context of the Center's responsibilities) has been controversial, with some suggestions that in view of the importance of the program UNESCO should allocate more than one percent of its regular budget to World Heritage. The remainder of the Center's budget is made up of contributions, and the Center is aggressively seeking partnerships with private and public enterprises to advance the work.

The Center secretariat not only manages the process of inscription of new world heritage sites and assists member nations in preparing proposals for inclusion, but manages the expert reviews of sites, responds to requests for expert opinion, manages a publication program on world heritage, helps to manage scientific research on the conservation and management of world heritage, provides educational materials and supports an outreach to kids.

Recognized world heritage sites are most densely located in Europe, and are sadly lacking in Africa and Oceana; there are 20 in the United States. Those in relatively affluent countries are usually well maintained; there maintenance represents a significant economic effort. The Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site in the United States, which is not part of the national park system, is perhaps an exception to this rule. Unfortunately, there are situations in which poor countries do not have the resources to effectively manage their world heritage, and sites are suffering accordingly. Were the World Heritage Center to have a more adequate budget it could provide more training and technical assistance to these countries, and indeed it might be possible to subsidize the maintenance of World Heritage sites were needed.

The most acute peril to world heritage sites probably comes in countries undergoing conflict. UNESCO's secretariat can be especially helpful in catalyzing global concern and support for protection of world heritage sites in such conditions, as was done in Bosnia.

One issue of some concern is how many World Heritage sites should be inscribed in the UNESCO list. Certainly some sites are of more transcendental importance than others. Is there a point at which adding more, less important sites will detract from the influence of the program in assuring the conservation and maintenance of the most important sites? In a few years, at the current rate of growth of the list, there will be 1,000 sites. Is that too many?

The students had some difficulty understanding the legal implications of the World Heritage Convention. Having been ratified by the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate, it has the force of law within the United States. However, there is no supra-national judiciary body that could enforce its provisions. While the convention requires signatory nations to inventory their world heritage sites and set up organizations for their maintenance, and to provide assistance where possible to other nations that request help in maintaining their own sites, given the sovereignty of the signatory nations there is no international system to police compliance. Moreover, given the lack of specificity in the terms of the Convention, it seems unlike that there would ever be an occasion to challenge the implementation by the United States in U.S. courts.

The question arises as to why the United States proposed and ratified the Convention. Since the Convention imposes duties on the nation, what do we get in return. Perhaps other conventions can help to understand the issue:

• The Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires each signatory nation to treat the prisoners of war that it holds in a humane way. Each signatory nation voluntarily imposes restrictions on the way it treats prisoners, but in return is assured that its citizens if prisoners of war in other signatory nations will be treated humanely. For each nation, the benefits to its own citizens are seen to more than justify any restrictions imposed on the way it treats prisoners from other nations.
• The Climate Change Convention currently under negotiation will presumably require each signatory nation to restrict its emissions of greenhouse gases. In return it can expect other signatory nations also to restrict such emissions. No nation can prevent greenhouse warming alone, but the nations of the world in collaboration can do so.

Americans enjoy traveling to Venice, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Egypt, or the Rose Red City of Petra where they can experience a spectacular cultural experience. Americans want to know that Australia's Great Barrier Reef or Iguazu Falls in South America are maintained in pristine state. The country is willing to pledge to maintain our own sites to assure that partner nations in the Convention will also pledge to maintain theirs. Through such cooperation, more of mankind's heritage can be maintained than any nation could achieve acting alone.

Education For All: Class of 2015

75 million children are out of schoool, and millions more struggle to stay in school. This is a battle we can win - with the right political will and resources Education for All is possible.

This short film was produced for the Education for All: Class of 2015 that was launched at the UN in September 2008. The class brings together celebrities, world leaders and activists to ensure that Education for All becomes a reality. www.classof2015.org



Comment: This video was used in our seminar on UNESCO, and was well regarded. JAD

Why is UNESCO the Way it Is?

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

The Problem

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

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

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

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

The Charter

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

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

Incrementalism and Fit

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

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

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

Governance

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

Our understanding of legislative bodies, as based on the Congress of the United States perhaps, must be adapted to the special features of UNESCO. American legislators get to know each other well, meeting frequently over a period of years. While the permanent delegates to UNESCO of the member states may get to know each other, most of the delegates to the biennial meetings may not have links to members of other delegations or even know other members of their own delegation well. The U.S. Congress delegates functions to a plethora of committees and subcommittees, each with its staff, which are in continuous operation; UNESCO depends only on its Executive Board, and the Secretariat of UNESCO both supports governance decision making and implements the decisions made.

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

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

The Secretariat

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

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

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

The Professional Communities

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

After EFA: What Next

Last night in our seminar, UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century, we conducted a role playing exercise in which the students debated future priorities for the global educational system.

Education for All (EFA) has been the basis for international efforts in education since 1990, complemented by the educational Millennium Development Goals and the Fast Track Initiative. Universal primary education was to be achieved by 2015, with a broader agenda that focused on lifelong learning as well as schooling.

While there has been great progress towards universal primary education, there are many nations which will not achieve that goal. Moreover, the quality of education has often suffered from the expansion efforts, and many observers feel that there is a dramatic need for better education as well as more education. Similarly, there are huge needs for educational opportunities for youths who are out of school, for trade and vocational educational services, for growth and improvement of higher educational systems, for better opportunities for girls' and women's education, for education for the disabled, and for more and better educational opportunities for marginalized groups and for the poor.

My co-coordinator of the course, Frank Method, make the point that there surely should be some global agreement reached on priorities for education after 2015. It will surely take several years to achieve such an agreement. The question was posed: "what can UNESCO do now and in the near future to help the world reach such an agreement, and further, to reach an agreement that will be effective in promoting education worldwide?"

There are a number of things UNESCO can do, including:

• Continuing the monitoring of EFA so that the negotiations will be based on a clear understanding of what has been accomplished and what remains to be done;
• Providing a forum for Ministers of Education and others to discuss the issues and opportunities now, before agreements have to be formalized;
• Supporting educational planning efforts in member countries so that they will enter the negotiation process with a clear picture of their internal priorities and of the potential roles of donors, civil society and the private sector in achieving their educational goals;
• Networking via National Commissions for UNESCO, Associated Non-Governmental Organizations, University Chairs and Networks and other means to stimulate wide discussion of the future priorities within the global community of educators and those interested in education;
• Mobilizing and publishing expert advice through seminars and publications; and using the media to bring the matter to the attention of the general public and to promote public interest in the priorities for future efforts to promote education.

It seems likely that a well defined sequel to EFA will help:

• to stimulate global efforts to improve education, and
  
• help governments, donors, NGOs and others to coordinate their efforts to achieve greater efficiency and relevance.

On the other hand such efforts could easily founder by lapsing into platitudinous generalities, by failing to offer enough benefits to the various participants to engender compromise, by failing to recognize the legitimate interests of the key participants, or by degenerating into fruitless controversy over the sources of funding or the locus of control.

The conclusion: UNESCO can and should play a useful role now and in the next few years in helping its member nations to reach a useful accord on the sequel to EFA.

The "Other" Education Programs Of UNESCO

Last week in our UNESCO seminar we discussed the role of the organization in coordinating the Education for All global program. This week we discussed the other sections of the UNESCO education program. The discussion in class raised complex issues that I will address in this posting.

The Components of UNESCO's Education Program

There is a complex education program managed in UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, which includes not only the monitoring and support of the Education for All program but also a number of other activities. UNESCO also funds and works through:

• A decentralized set of six educational institutes and two education centers
• The UNESCO Institute of Statistics which emphasizes educational statistics (but also works in areas of scientific, cultural and communications statistics)

UNESCO also influences education via programs and activities managed by its

• 27 cluster offices covering 148 member states,
  
• 21 national offices (each serving a single member state),
  
• 10 regional bureaus (4 of which -- Nairobi, Beirut, Bangkok, and Santiago de Chile -- are for education),
  
• and liaison offices in Geneva an New York.

Moreover, other programs of UNESCO conduct educational activities within their specific fields of action.

There are many other organizations that have affiliated with UNESCO (without UNESCO funding), through which UNESCO can influence educational systems and educators:

• 623 UNESCO Chairs and 60 UNITWIN networks of universities
• 335 non-governmental organizations that have affiliated with UNESCO
• partners from the private sector (multinational corporations, small and medium enterprises, philanthropic foundations, professional and economic associations, as well as other organizations of the business community and individuals.)
• 4,000 UNESCO clubs in 100 countries
• 7,900 UNESCO Associated Schools in 176 countries
• National Commissions for UNESCO which are required by the organization's charter in each of the 193 member states.
  

Follow the Money

According to UNESCO's Approved Program and Budget for 2008-2009, the budget for UNESCO's education program (exclusive of overhead for the overall operation of the agency) is about US$88.5 million per year. That can be compared to the budget for my local school system (Montgomery County, Maryland) of US$2.2 billion per year. According to the OECD Development Assistance Committee, the total commitments to educational aid in 2007 were US$10.2 billion.

About 62 percent of the overall education program budget is in the regular budget and the rest is to come from "extrabudgetary resources" donated to the organization. UNESCO divides it educational budget between that of the six educational institutes (US$7.9 million per year, of which only US$250 thousand is voluntary contribution) and four subprograms. Two of these ("Global leadership in EFA, coordination of United Nations priorities in education, and development of strong partnerships" and "Provide capacity development and technical support to assist national efforts in achieving the Dakar Goals") appear to be primarily in support of Education for All. The other two ("Development of a global framework and networks for capacity development in planning and management of education systems" and "Promote policy dialog, research, set norms and standards") appear to relate primarily to the non-EFA efforts. These latter two subprograms have a total annual budget of US$26.2 million, of which three-quarters is from the assessed contributions and one-quarter from voluntary contributions.

Governance

The central educational programs of UNESCO are managed by the Secretariat under the direction of the 193 member General Conference (one-nation, one vote) that meets every other year, and the 58 member Executive Board. The decentralized Institutes and Centers have their own governing bodies.

Of course the myriad organizations affiliated with UNESCO which do not receive UNESCO funding have their own independent governance structures.

Complementary Organizations

UNESCO operates within a web of intergovernmental organizations. Some, such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization have important educational interests within their own spheres of activity (e.g. WHO: medical and nursing education and non-formal health education; FAO: agricultural education and agricultural extension services; ILO: lifelong learning and technical and vocational education.) Some have even more direct involvement with schooling:

• The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF): This is a fund administered under the United Nations system which received over US$3 billion in donations in 2007. The Executive Director is an American, and the United States is UNICEF's largest donor. It is governed by an Executive Board of 36 members with a specified regional distribution elected for four year terms by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
  
• The United Nations University (UNU) does research and capacity building. It has a headquarters in Tokyo and 14 research and training centers/programs around the world as well as a network of associated and cooperating institutions and scholars. The Rector of the UNU has the rank of Undersecretary General of the United Nations. The UNU Governing Council has 24 appointed members and several ex officio members including the Secretary General of UNESCO. The UNU is funded by voluntary contributions, with an annual budget of some US$75 million per year and an Endowment with nearly US$400 million.
• The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) seeks "to deliver innovative training and to conduct research on knowledge systems to develop the capacity of beneficiaries." Its Director General has the rank of Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. It is a relatively small agency that emphasizes executive training for UN staff and for personnel of the 190 member nations of the UN.
• The United Nations Development Program is a program of the United Nations organization itself. It is currently emphasizing efforts in support of the Millennium Development Goals. The UNDP Administrator is the third highest ranking member of the United Nations staff after the United Nations Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary . The current Secretary General is a Turkish citizen (with long experience in intergovernmental organizations) but in its early years the Secretary General was always a U.S. citizen. In 2005, the UNDP’s entire budget was approximately US$4.44 billion. Of that total, core, unrestricted financing reached approximately US$921 million. Non-core, earmarked contributions grew to over US$2.5 billion, and resources to support countries’ own development programs totaled US$1.02 billion. The UNDP Executive Board is made up of representatives from 36 countries around the world who serve on a rotating basis.
• Multilateral Development Banks: The World Bank Group, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank and other regional development banks provide loans and grants to developing and transition countries. The World Bank has the largest budget among these, but other development banks may have larger budgets within their regions. The World Bank has transferred about US$36.5 billion in loans and credits for education since the Bank started lending in the sector in 1963. Funds for the multilateral development banks are obtained by borrowing from capital markets; they borrow money at good rates due to the guarantee provided by donor nations. They also receive pledged contributions to concessionary windows such as the International Development Agency of the World Bank Group. The president of the World Bank is generally considered to be named by the U.S. government, and the Members of the Board of Directors are elected to serve specific regions by a process which recognizes the financial contributions to the Bank of the nations within the specific regions they represent.
  
• The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) provides some educational services for some refugees. The United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Mid East (UNRWA) provides educational services for its target population.
  

Donor nations also have bilateral development assistance programs which provide financial and technical assistance to the educational sectors of developing nations. (According to the OECD Development Assistance Committee, in 2007 total donor assistance amounted to US$120.8 billion, while that for all multilateral agencies amounted to US$11.8 billion.)

The OECD, sometimes thought of as a "rich nations club" provides intergovernmental services to its member states. There are also a number of regional international organizations (e.g. European Union, Organization of American States) that have educational programs serving the governments in their regions.

The fundamental point is that donor nations provide relatively little economic support for education through UNESCO, favoring other channels over which they have more influence in the governing bodies.

UNESCO as an Institutional Response to Globalization

In the past the global education sector was highly fragmented, not only into national sectors but even into local educational systems within nation-states. In the 20th century, especially in its second half with increasing globalization, national educational communities found it increasingly possible and important to deal with each other. Indeed, social institutions are evolving to allow them to do so.

Think about a market as an institution that is not an formal organization but that allows large numbers of buyers and sellers to interact in a productive manner, especially through an economic process which Adam Smith termed “The Invisible Hand”. The social institution that is allowing national educational communities to interact globally may too function via an invisible hand. However, as an economic market depends on formal organizations such as regulators and standards organizations for its functioning, so the evolving global institution allowing interaction among national educational communities also involves formal organizations, among which is UNESCO, or better, the core network of UNESCO related organizations.

Is UNESCO More Like a Spider or a Starfish?

My first thought when I consider the term “institution” is to think of large, formal organizations such as manufacturing firms, governments, schools systems, or UNESCO. My friends who are economists tend, I believe, to think of the market as the prototypical “institution”. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to think of a broad spectrum of social institutions.

UNESCO is of course a formal organization, and as such it is an enormously complex, highly decentralized organization, beset by very complex governance structures and weak financing, as well as a multinational, multilingual, multiethnic staff dispersed among offices in 50 countries. Its Education Program is then seen as a vertically organized program within this complex structure.

The UNESCO Education Program can also be seen as an the nexus of a network of a large number of interacting organizations – Institutes, Centers, National Commissions, Associated Schools, Clubs, University Chairs and Networks, affiliated Non-Governmental Organizations, and other partner organizations. This network is in turn part of a still larger network of Ministries of Education, school systems, professional organizations of educators, etc.

In this respect, one might consider The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. I quote from the author's description of the book's thesis:

One thing that business, institutions, governments and key individuals will have to realize is spiders and starfish may look alike, but starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. But cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.

But starfish don't just exist in the animal kingdom. Starfish organizations are taking society and the business world by storm, and are changing the rules of strategy and competition. Like starfish in the sea, starfish organizations are organized on very different principles than we are used to seeing in traditional organizations. Spider organizations are centralized and have clear organs and structure. You know who is in charge. You see them coming.

Starfish organizations, on the other hand, are based on completely different principles. They tend to organize around a shared ideology or a simple platform for communication- around ideologies like al Qaeda or Alcoholics Anonymous. They arise rapidly around the simplest ideas or platforms. Ideas or platforms that can be easily duplicated. Once they arrive they can be massively disruptive and are here to stay, for good or bad. And the Internet can help them flourish.

Using this metaphor, UNESCO is perhaps more like a starfish than like a spider, especially in terms of its quite decentralized system of governance, management and control.

Management theory was developed in the 20th century, and in most of that century focused on the management of large, centrally managed organizations. It has been suggested, notably in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Alfred D., Jr. Chandler, that these spider-like organizations evolved because the information processes of the large hierarchical organization more adequately met the needs of expanding industries than did markets.

With the Information Revolution the world is seeing many large organizations downsize, outsourcing many of their functions. Essentially the increasingly powerful information infrastructure is thought to make other means of coordination possible which are still more efficient and effective than those of traditional hierarchical organizations. As a result, there is much more interest among management theorists in decentralized organizations and their management.

While UNESCO's Constitution calls for National Commissions to share with their national governments the responsibility for the governance of UNESCO, in fact it is the governments that have taken most of the authority for that representation. Thus most of the people functioning in UNESCO's governing bodies are members of large, bureaucratic organizations. One expects these people to naturally conceive of management in terms of the theories most applicable to the hierarchical organizations in which they work. To the degree that UNESCO is decentralized rather than centralized, starfish-like rather than spider-like, alternative management theories may be more effective.

The lack of central planning and control over UNESCO's myriad educational activities bothers most bureaucrats, including many of those involved in UNESCO's governance. The question should be asked, however, whether the organization achieves more with its limited financial and human resources in advancing global education objectives of its member states with its current structure than it could with a more traditional bureaucracy.

Education for All

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

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

Unfortunately:

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

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

The Dick and Ray Show

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

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

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

Ray Wanner checking his notes

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

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

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


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