Suchergebnisse

The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is not a diplomatic conference, or a parliament, or an executive organ, although it smacks of all three. Among international, governmental, deliberative bodies it is sui generis. As such, it engages in discussing quasi diplomatic issues, chiefly economic and social in nature, in recommending policy actions by governments, in trying to plan and coordinate interagency programs in the economic and social domain, and in innovating and supervising programs under UN sponsorship.

This discussion purports to review some of the more significant developments that have marked the management of UN operational programs during recent years. The emphasis of the commentary is on the highlights of field administration since 1960 when the research for the present writer's more extensive study on this subject was completed.

The Soviet attack on the United Nations during the Fifteenth General Assembly, along with the Congo operation, has served to dramatize the emergence of the World Organization as a far-flung administrative instrumentality. Initially organized primarily to manage meetings and to provide clearing-house functions, the UN Secretariat has progressively taken on a wide variety of "action research" projects both in New York and in the regional economic commissions. More important still, it has become engaged in a complex congeries of field programs which now absorb roughly half the time of its professional personnel. Not only does it help to plan economic, social, and technical programs of increasing magnitude, but it undertakes to implement such programs around the globe—often in cooperation with one or more of the specialized agencies. Certain of these programs, e.g., the Special Fund and OPEX (Operational, Executive, and Administrative Personnel), owe their design in large part to ideas originating within the UN bureaucracy: spurred by the Secretary-General's leadership the staff has dared to improvise and to innovate as the political climate has permitted.

Based on part of his work entitled, Field administration in the United Nations system.

Among the more significant international phenomena of the past generation has been the expanding role of administration in the proliferating intergovernmental agencies. The dimensions of international administration have increased in at least four ways: (1) in the number and variety of institutions at both the global and the regional level; (2) in the functional reaches of their operations—from strictly centralized and transnational to territorially deconcentrated and subnational activities (as, for example, in the UN technical assistance program, Unesco, NATO, and the European Coal and Steel Community)