Reforming the UN System to Help Meet the MDGs
Mark Malloch Brown, Chef de Cabinet to the Secretary-General, United Nations

John Mutter: Everybody take their seats, please. I'd like to begin the afternoon session. The afternoon will go much like the morning, begin with a keynote presentation, in this case by Mark Malloch Brown, who's Chief of Staff to Secretary-General of the United Nations. To introduce our keynote speaker I want to bring back to the stage the Director of the Earth Institute and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who you heard from this morning, Jeff Sachs. Please welcome Jeff back to the stage.

Jeffrey Sachs: Thank you, John. What a morning, my word, that was really incredible, wasn't it? I want to personally thank all of the speakers because I thought every single presentation was really superb, and everyone surely learned a tremendous amount. This afternoon we're privileged to have again a number of really remarkable people with us, and a lot of the crème de le crème of the United Nations, which is tremendously important.

I don't know about you, but certainly one of the first things that went through my mind after September 11th and all the shock and horror was how the world was going to hold together rather than going off to massive conflict. And the very first calls that I made in the days afterward were to the UN leadership to speak with Secretary-General, and to speak with our next speaker.

Mark Malloch Brown at the time was the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, and he was already known throughout the world as one of the great bulwarks of a civilized world society and one of the leaders of the United Nations that we all look to to hold things together. And it was clear at the time what significant role Mark would be playing. He was already the leading spokesman in the world for the United Nations and thinking leader on development issues as the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. But it was clear that his role would only continue to grow in the days ahead.

Koffi Annan had the idea that we would give Mark super-intensive training by having Mark supervise me for a while, understanding that that would force Mark to the ultimate of exertions, which it indeed did. I can testify I pushed Mark right to the limit and beyond many times, knowing in all seriousness that there are few people in the world that take a sense of responsibility, deep responsibility, for the future like Mark does, and he's ready to push the envelope every day on behalf of a global peace and a fair world. And because of that we do make progress, tremendous progress, under also very great odds.

It wasn't surprising then with Mark's leadership that he was asked by the Secretary-General a year ago to become Secretary-General's Chief of Staff, and to take on a massive amount of difficult work in the midst of a year of great summitry, and a great many problems about UN reform. And Mark of course did that impossible task splendidly. And in the wake of that it therefore wasn't surprising that a few weeks ago it was announced that Mark Malloch Brown would be made, as of later this week, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. And I know from experience he can put up with a lot. You have to in this world. He's an extraordinary, extraordinary leader, and we all are and should be grateful for that leadership, and I'm especially grateful that he's here today with us. Mark.

Mark Malloch Brown: Jeff, thank you. And you, I think it goes without saying, have contributed a huge amount to whatever success I was lucky enough to have at UNDP. You were quite right, you were always controversial, complete handful, I spent more time apologizing for you than I did for the rest of the UNDP combined, but it was worth every moment of the ride. And I was teasing Jeff the other week that there's now a very good new history of UNDP coming out, which points out the partnership between an earlier administrator, Bill Draper, and the extraordinary development economist Mabubal Hak [??] which led to the human development reports. And this history suggests that again an administrator got lucky in my case, and found a wonderful partner in Jeff for the Millennium Development Goals. And I profoundly believe that, and I even believed it on the bad days.

But I am thrilled to come and I'm not at all surprised that there should be such a remarkable turnout of people, not just from Columbia, but from this wider community that we're all so proud to be part of that cares deeply about global issues such as the development and the environment. So for me it is a wonderful opportunity to share with you where UN reform is going in the context of those issues we all care about.

And you know, I think eighteen months ago when I went over to work with the Secretary-General and we were struggling with how to use the forthcoming summit, which happened last September, the so-called Millennium Plus Five Summit, which would be a review of the Millennium Development Goals, what we wanted to do was capture the work that Jeff and I had already been doing at UNDP with the help of so many people, many of them in this room and in UNDP on the Millennium Development Goals. But we wanted to put that in a broader context which would in our eyes renew the fundamental social compact between the United Nations and the peoples of the world, a sense that that compact had gotten terribly frayed, and that the post-Cold War world, the world of globalization as it's called in shorthand I think, had not been kind to the UN's stature in the eyes of many around the world, that what should have been its moment of triumph as borders came down, as there was a huge acceleration in the flows of goods and information and trade and ideas across borders, that nevertheless somehow this moment of globalization had de-legitimized the very global institutions that had played such a significant role in promoting it. And as we reflected on that, we saw in the case of a kind of a classic political campaign almost that we had to reconnect with our base, and our base is ultimately in the eyes of a Secretary-General like Koffi Annan not just governments, but peoples. How could we revive and refocus a UN that made a difference in the lives of people everywhere? And hence the choice of what we called development, security and human rights, but really in the area of development meant poverty, the environment, and humanitarian assistance. And in the issue of security meant not just traditional wars between states, but the emergence of the new threats of terrorism, of failing states, of criminal violence in the vast new cities, under-policed cities, of the developing world. And under human rights we meant again a broad concept, not just limited to human rights alone, but to the supporting need for democracy and the rule of law, and for understanding between societies and cultures. And we felt that if we could rebuild the UN around these three pillars we would create a UN which once more appealed to people everywhere, New Yorkers as much of those in a poor village in Africa or Latin America, that there was a commonality of demand from global citizens about what they wanted their international institution to do, that we could address if we could refocus the organization.

And we actually, you wouldn't know it through the sort of mixed press coverage that reform of a large dubious international bureaucracy always wins, that we've actually made pretty significant progress. And I'm going to come back to development later, because in a way it's the heart of what I want to say today, but already in development last year was based on the work done around the MDGs, that created a platform for an astonishing increase in at least the commitments to development finance, the expectation that by 2010 we'll have a hundred billion dollars of development assistance, double what it was ten years previously in 2000, with very dramatic increases in the amounts targeted at poor countries, particularly Africa. And that process would never have happened. It culminated at Gleneagles and the G8 Summit, and in the meeting of European leaders just before that, but it would never have happened if the UN had not set those MDGs as goals and used its normative role to do that, if it hadn't worked with fellow institutions like the World Bank and non-governmental organizations, and the whole network of people that Jeff brought together in the MDG project, if we'd not carried that broad coalition of the development community from its own extremes of right to left, of large to small, of official to unofficial and community-based, if we'd not carried that whole community with us we wouldn't have got to Gleneagles and we wouldn't have got from Gleneagles to the endorsement at the Summit of these ambitious new financing goals to achieve the MDGs. But I don't need to tell anyone in this room that those kinds of financial commitments are the beginning, not the end of the issue, that they leave unsaid and unaddressed a host of contingent issues, and I'm going to come back to those a little later.

But beyond that success in development, and I would say relatedly in the environment, with insufficient but nevertheless some reference to one environmental MDG and an effort by many of us to build up the other parts of the MDGs that relate to the environment, so there, too, I think some progress. And third progress on the humanitarian side, with the creation of a so far little noticed but very ambitious fund to be released as soon as natural disasters happen around the world, to break this terrible cycle of the disaster needing to be followed by the fundraising that has so delayed responses to the earthquake in Kashmir, to the tsunami a year earlier, to the run of the mill hurricanes, floods, droughts, that have become so much part of the modern environmental crisis. So we have created a fund which has already now got several hundred million dollars in commitments, and which is going to hopefully dramatically change the world's ability to respond quickly to disasters as they happen. But development, as I said, is just one chapter.

The second chapter is security, wherein perhaps the second most significant institutional reform that we've created over the last year, the peace building commission has been created, an effort at its simplest to bring together the different actors to putting together a state after conflict. Obviously the new government itself, which must always take the lead and ownership of the rebuilding process, but the political, security, and economic and social actors who in the past have tended to be on completely different pages marching to completely different tunes, so through this peace building commission we hope that donors, neighbors, local participants in a crisis, together with UN agencies, the World Bank, the IMF and others, will sit ‘round the same table to develop a common peace building strategy that everybody supports politically and financially, and allows a greater consistency of the whole peace building effort than we have seen. And that of course builds on the recent experiences that we've seen in Liberia, Sierra Leone, in East Timor, in Afghanistan, where this need to work together in a coherent whole has emerged as such a critical issue in determining whether countries fall back to conflict or make the steady progress forward towards a stable development path. But as I said, security isn't limited to that.

Security also touches on terrorism, it touches on crime and the rule of law. And on all these issues we've pushed, too. And on one, perhaps the most old fashioned of the lot in terms of the agenda for the Summit, we failed dismally, which was nuclear non-proliferation. And we are already seeing the harvest of that with the confrontation now in the Security Council over Iran's nuclear program. You know, we are world flying dangerously close to the Sun where it's become reasonable for some countries to assume you don't need a strong universally applyable [applicable] nuclear non-proliferation regime and framework, one which both addresses the need for no new proliferation and emergence as much as possible of weapon states, and secondly the trade-off for that, steady disarmament of the existing nuclear weapon states. And the failure of that framework is breeding an insecurity that we see today in Iran, but which will spread if not addressed to that sub-region and beyond as we fail to find the instruments to prevent new regional nuclear arms races. So you know, I think we should recognize that while on some of the newer sources of conflict we've made progress over the last year, on a big old fashioned issue like nuclear weapons we're worse off today than we were ten or twenty years ago in some significant ways.

And from there to the third pillar of this new UN that I described, the human rights issues, where we have seen yesterday the final meeting, the burial with full honors, of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which was a happy wake of an affair because there's a successor, the progeny is alive and well, although only just, as I'm sure you all noted in getting the Human Rights Council established we faced a hugely difficult fight with different groups of member states. The Secretary-General had proposed that to make a clean break with the Human Rights Commission which had allowed a series of human rights abusers to not only be on the Commission but have leadership roles in the Commission, allowing them to block a lot of human rights issues that should have been on the work of the Commission and encourage others which shouldn't necessarily have received as much attention as they did in the work of the Commission, so rolling that back and creating a new Council had led the Secretary-General to propose a two-thirds voting requirement for states to be elected to the Council. Ultimately the membership were not willing to go with that, and interestingly it wasn't the human rights abusers who against such a high threshold, it was a lot of states who were, you know, good supporters of and respecters of human rights, but just didn't think they had enough friends in the world to cross the two-thirds bar in a competitive election, and so asked that we limit to an absolutely majority of the members, in other words you need ninety-six votes to be elected, which is still a huge improvement over what existed before, where different regional groups would behind a closed door create a regional slate within many cases not even a vote at the regional level, and then the whole slate would be nodded through by the membership at large. We're moving from that to where you need ninety-six votes in a secret ballot. So it's a dramatic transformation of the world's human rights machinery. And tragically the United States was one of four who voted against it, but I think the US is committed to working within it. This is not going to be one of those situations where the US holds out and condemns the institution. I very much hope they're going to be part of it, and are at the moment making up their minds whether they're going to run in the first elections for membership. And I think they're actually now rather relieved that they only have to secure ninety-six votes in a secret ballot and not two-thirds of the membership.

But I want come back to development, because here is a UN which has tried to create this new focus, and again development, security, human rights. And I'm going to just say one word about the management reform to support that. The organization which we have today is not the organization of twenty years ago, ten years ago, let alone sixty years ago. It has undergone during the time of this Secretary-General a dramatic transformation. Today two-thirds of his Secretariat staff do not work from anymore in New York, they work in the field. There are twice as many civilian staff in our peacekeeping missions alone as he has in the Secretariat in New York. And additionally he has 85,000 troops seconded to us as peacekeepers. And the bigger of these peacekeeping operations easily have budgets of a billion dollars each, and there are some eighteen of them. And so this is big business. But what it is is running operations in some of the world's most difficult neighborhoods, running peacekeeping operations, running peace building operations, running humanitarian response, and for UNDP and UNICEF and others day to day in 180 countries or so just running development programs in challenging, difficult, but very rewarding situations. And that operational work of the UN is the real heart and soul of the modern organization. It's not organizing conferences or writing reports in New York. And yet whereas a UNICEF or a UNDP has steadily evolved that new very operational, dynamic, far flung, decentralized, global operating model that it requires, the Secretariat has stayed stuck in a straitjacket of controlling New York by member states through a complex committee system, and has not built up the decentralized management flexibility, or even the staff in the field operations, with giving them the chance of building up their careers moving from operation to operation that you would expect for this extraordinary global enterprise that the organization has now become. So we're trying to fix that.

But as an old administrator of UNDP I can't take my eye off the bit that I think in many ways will make the most difference to the most people in the world, and that is our efforts to restructure the development system of the UN itself. We have announced, the Secretary-General announced, several weeks ago a panel that had been approved in the Summit to look at the coherence of the UN in the areas of development, environment, and humanitarian assistance, to try and end the extraordinary fragmentation that we have in the system at the moment between the eighteen or so agencies that you can find in some countries, all with the UN name on them, but each with a separate office and a separate program, not integrated in an effective way. And we felt that we were only going to get a solution which really rose to the challenge of the occasion which simply put was we've established the MDGs, we've got the world to express the political will to achieve them by 2015, we've laid out a broad blueprint as to how they should be achieved which now needs to be operationalized at the country level, we've put at least the promise of the financing largely in place, but unless we can now put our own house in order and fix how the UN operates we're going to let down our part of the show in terms of support to countries as they achieve those MDGs. And that was the driving idea behind this panel that we need to pass now towards implementation, and looking at ourselves hard in the mirror to make sure we're effectively organized to do it. And so this panel, led by three Prime Ministers so that it would have a real political push and impetus to it to kind of go for radical solutions, Jens Stoltenberg the Prime Minister of Norway, Shaukat Aziz the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and Luisa Diogo the Prime Minister of Mozambique. It has a couple of formidable ex-Presidents who made these issues a part of their time in office, Lagos of Chile, and Mkapa of Tanzania, the heads of various development institutions, north and south alike, and other key ministers, and it's going to have its first meeting in New York next week. But its goal is to take just a hard look at how we can combine our system in a more effective way, not just to make sure the UN parts of it work more effectively but how we relate to the World Bank, the bilateral donors, the European Union, etcetera. And if we were to give an initial sign of the symptoms for which we want a prescription from this panel it is that the system is currently too fragmented, too many small UN agencies, but also bilateral ones as well, that it's too supply-driven, by which we mean it's driven still today by what donors are willing to provide money for, often in a very fashion-driven way where they provide money this year but not next year, and is not in that sense really responsive to the demands of developing countries, that because of all this fragmentation of different agency presence, UN and others, it's got a terribly high overhead compared to the funds actually going into program work, that there's tremendous duplication that all of us who have done field work see every day. We want a system which is unified, unified not into a mega-institution necessarily at all, but unified around a country's own development strategy, that is demand-driven, to give that country the resources on a really predictable multi-year basis so that they can enter into ambitious efforts to meet health or education goals, knowing that the funding is secured long-term, as long as they stick with the program on their side, a system which sharply reduces the overhead, which year by year makes sure that more cents in the development dollar really are reaching the poor of the developing world and not getting stuck in the pockets of consultants or Western providers or contractors of assistance, and one where there is finally clarify of roles, that everybody knows what we're doing. And here finally a word on the UN's own part of that. I mean obviously we view ourselves as bringing to the table an enormous role in normative leadership. The MDGs are a classic example of something that emerged from UN leadership and UN summits, and out of the earlier summits of the ‘90s, the Children's Summit, the Environment Summit, the Social Summit, and the Women's and Family Health Summits, all of these produced these goals that are now at the center of the development equation for everybody. Secondly, an advocacy role, the promotion of these MDGs not just the big campaign of make poverty history last year, which we played a supporting role with so many NGOs around the world, and the advocacy work that Jeff and others have taken on with key Western parliaments and governments, but the advocacy role above all else in developing countries themselves, to put the MDGs at the center of political life, to make governments everywhere forced to respond to demands of their own voters and citizens for steady, measurable, benchmarked improvements in the provision of health and education and the quality of life and the quality of the environment. And finally to the extraordinarily politically neutral, vital capacity building technical assistance role that the UN system plays at the country level. This provider of critical now support to expand countries' capacity to take on more ambitious development strategies as they respond to the global commitment to meet these MDGs where business as usual will not be an option, where building up the capacity to sharply increase both the inputs and outputs into your health and education and employment generation and environmental protection programs are going to be a huge challenge to public and private sector in developing countries, and where the UN is best placed of all to support in that capacity building role. But equally recognizing where we're not the leads, in the financing and in many other areas where either the developing country themselves or other partners, the European Commission, the World Bank, the big bilaterals have a much more significant role than perhaps we can have. And then finally recognizing our very special role in humanitarian disasters, natural and manmade, and in the transition to peace building, the whole engagement in failing states where it's UN and NGO partners, as so often the human sinews and human capital to service delivery and to peace building before the normal institutions of government work. So a huge exciting, if you like, agenda for us. But it must be located within a much more coherent, unified system than in the past.

So I tell you all this, and I rush against my time here, but I would say in closing that for myself and my boss, Koffi Annan, and for all of us in the UN it's also a race against time because we have nine months of his Secretary-Generalship. All of us, you know, realize that for us midnight strikes on the 31st of December and we're determined to put all of these changes so far in motion that neither the debate and election of a new Secretary-General or a new Secretary-General could or would want to reverse this vital process of renewal and refocus to make the UN what I think everybody today, perhaps more even than sixty years ago wanted, which is an institution which people everywhere hears their aspirations, responds to them, supports them, really a UN of we the peoples, to cite the phrase in our founding charter.

Thank you very much.