Sealing the deal

Working in international development, certainly at headquarters in New York, isn't always what it seems. Despite the best intentions of most staff members, outcomes are often disconnected from logic and are heavily political.

I was recently reminded of this at a meeting of the Bureau of the Executive Board, where five grown men — each highly-paid senior diplomats in the service of their governments — sat around a table discussing the date for the UNDP/UNFPA Executive Board in January 2010. The date had already been set for mid-January, but this was now the second meeting to discuss changing the dates; Bureau members were unhappy that the Executive Board of UNICEF would be preceding the UNDP/UNFPA Executive Board. After an hour of deliberation, there was still no resolution.

Creating the documentation for this one-hour meeting took two-and-a-half days, with a lot of back and forth between colleagues in UNDP and UNFPA. The output was a four-page rationale as to why it would pose serious problems to move the date for the session before UNICEF (distributed at the meeting and therefore, not read). Perhaps the most poignant moment for me was when, during the course of the meeting, the President of the Bureau reminded me, and other members of the Executive Board secretariat, that the United Nations exists to serve Member States. Whatever the Member States want is what the United Nations needs to deliver. If Member States want the days of the Executive Board session moved to the first week of January, when most people aren't around and when the session would coincide with Christian Orthodox Christmas and when it would be unlikely that most documents could be delivered in all official languages, then that's what Members should get. And we were reminded that, regardless of the costs, those documents should be delivered in all languages.

It was a stark refresher: the lofty goals of the original United Nations, laid out while the ashes of war still smouldered around the globe in the late 1940s, has essentially devolved into petty politics of ego maniacs and blatant stupidity.

Another, more serious, reminder came later in the week. At an inter-agency meeting — that is a meeting with several organizations present at the table — one of my colleagues mentioned 'COP 15'. For the sake of simplicity, COP 15 refers to the upcoming (December 2009) climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a successor agreement to Kyoto is supposed to be agreed upon. A tremendous amount of resources — your tax dollars and my tax dollars — have been spent organizing the conference, creating documentation and informational resources, and promoting it (Seal the Deal!).

The Secretary-General and many of the heads of United Nations funds and programmes have strongly vested interests in a meaningful outcome from Copenhagen. They argue, quite rightly, that poverty alleviation is now closely tied to climate change mitigation and prevention because most of the impact from rising ocean levels, for example, will be borne by those least able to cope with it. And furthermore, the poor are least responsible for changing the environment. If we are to have any credibility in meeting the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, climate change must be addressed.

At any rate, back to my meeting.

My colleague mentioned, in passing, that it may be possible that several critical international players may not be at the table in Copenhagen to forge a deal. In fact, she followed that up by saying, without these participants the entire outcome possibility for the conference will be changed. Whereas before, at the conclusion of the conference, the intention was to announce a climate deal to which the world agreed, the Secretary-General in now likely going to settle on an announcement that the world agrees on the need for a climate deal. In other words, all that money has been spent to take us from the possibility of solid action to the continuation of political conjecture.

There is still a month left to go before Copenhagen, and if I learned one thing, it's that the real deals take place in the shadows and back rooms. I generally don't have access to this, so things may change. Still, I felt this nugget of interesting information might be valuable for a couple of reasons.

The hopes and possibilities for multilateralism are, despite the dire need for such a collective approach, slipping to forces of business, lobbyists and financiers. This is the main reason why players who need to be at the table won't be at the table -- the perception that limiting greenhouse gas emissions will have a detrimental impact on the economy. It would seem, therefore, the multilateral system is as much about creating problems as it is about solving problems, which is why there are very few real outcomes from 60 or so years of United Nations presence. If we are to correct the problems around multilateralism, we must make it as much about humanism as it is about capitalism — right now, the balance is most certainly in favour of the latter.

Canadians — most of whom are moderate, generous, and compassionate — must invest as much, if not more, in creating stronger bilateral exchanges with partners around the world. I don't believe a full extraction from the multilateral system would help Canada. But I do believe that we can help promote the ideas of justice, human rights and good governance through direct knowledge exchange and setting a proper example, rather than relying solely on the United Nations. If the United Nations is quickly becoming toothless and moribund under its own weight, it is certainly thanks to the calibre of direction it receives from its Member States. It's clear that, now more than ever, it has become servant to all, but unable to play master in any of its mandated areas.

By the way, it did not take me two days to write this.