Address by Mark Malloch Brown

ADDRESS BY MARK MALLOCH BROWN

UNDP ADMINISTRATOR

TO THE EXECUTIVE BOARD

THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE ADMINISTRATOR

JUNE 19, 2000

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning and welcome to this week of what I’m sure will be very interesting exchanges on UNDP. And let me begin it by reporting to you on a year of considerable change which itself builds on the longer momentum of change that the Multi Year Funding Framework and the excellent Results Oriented Annual Report have led us to.

But I think that despite all the achievements we can point to -- and the tremendous analytical depth that we are provided by the new ROAR in terms of where our programme is going -- we nevertheless have to remain modest about our achievements. We have to recognize that it is a year of change at the beginning of a century of revolution, a century where incremental management-driven change in any organization is unlikely to be sufficient. We still need to learn to break out of boxes, to think radically and to implement radically.

CHANGE, RENEWAL AND FOCUS

So yes, we have taken major steps over the last year to reorient UNDP’s focus and concentration. The ROAR shows that 67% of our outcomes are now related to capacity building -- and of those 42% are in the policy, regulatory and legal framework areas, and another 33% in institutional capacity building.
Yes, we are moving to put our people back in the field where development happens. We are well underway now on our 25% cut in Headquarters, combining both the reduction and redeployment of staff. And since January, the headcount in New York has shrunk by 6%, the first such reduction in more than a decade.
Yes, we are moving -- I am afraid, in an enforced way -- for cost cuts with a 10% in core administrative costs planned over the next year.

Yes, we have also moved to renew the leadership of UNDP reaching both inside the organization and outside for a new leadership team. Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, who I think many of you may know, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, is joining us after the summer as the Regional Director for the Arab States region. But equally we reached inside for new leaders. And I am delighted that Abdoulie Janneh of Gambia, who has been our Resident Representative in Ghana, and then leader of the Transition Team, has now been appointed by the Secretary-General as the Director of the Africa region of UNDP.

We have additionally recruited a first ever Chief Information Officer for the organisation. We have created the post and filled it. Pieter De Zwart of the Netherlands will be joining us shortly to play this critical role of pulling together our information systems. But again for these key new posts, we have also reached inside. So for the new post of Director for our Office of Finance and Administration, effectively the Chief Financial Officer, we have appointed Gilbert Houngbo of Togo, who is one of our young stars. We have also recruited Nancy Birdsall of the United States, formerly second-in-command at the Inter-American Development Bank and now at the Carnegie Endowment as a part-time Senior Advisor for the Human Development Report, a role from which Richard Jolly is shortly retiring. Any of you who know her writings, will know that her selection shows a re-commitment to our efforts and intellectual leadership in the fight against poverty.

And there are more to come. We are in the world of soccer here, so I think it is reasonable to say the draft continues. I hope and expect we will surprise you with some other exciting appointments in the coming weeks and months. But let me also thank the extraordinary team of interim officers in charge, who have worked with me and Zephirin Diabre and led the change. There was a great virtue in using insiders in this first phase. They both know where the levers of power are hidden, and also where the skeletons are buried! They have played a great role in fast-tracking change which at this stage would have been much harder to do quickly using a team of outsiders.

REALIGNING COUNTRY OFFICES

But let me now say that perhaps more important than any of these changes that we have made at Headquarters is that we are aligning the field offices behind them. I am giving my own attention as self-appointed Chief Personnel Officer of the Organization to the selection of Resident Coordinators and the Deputy Resident Representatives. We have also focused management attention on these issues, including a day’s retreat on those countries where we think there is a need for special attention, either because we consider our programmes weaker than they should be or because the development needs are so critical that they merit special effort in terms of management support.

And starting with the retreat of our global Resident Coordinators/Resident Representatives in Glen Cove earlier in the year, through to a Special Session of our Executive Team in late July -- for which a group of Resident Representatives are now planning -- we are seeking to model a new country office aligned behind the overall vision we have developed for the Organization. So we have for example already cut field office reports to Headquarters by 50% -- from a remarkable 100 reports per year which were required of our field office colleagues to less than 50. But there is in my view still a long way to go in order to free the time of our management in the field to focus on the country programmes rather than feeding the beast of Headquarters in terms of reporting needs.

We have also moved to redeploy a very large portion of our Bureau of Development Policy staff to the field. We are taking 50 of our BDP posts and putting them in sub-regional clusters of policy support to our field offices as we have reported to you before. A further 48 staff from the GEF and Montreal Protocol are also being decentralized to the field. We are also moving to reformulate our South-South technical cooperation. We will in due course come to the appropriate inter-governmental mechanisms with proposals for restructuring TCDC to make it a much more integrated part of our broader activities, ensuring that there is a growing volume of South-South technical cooperation in all our country level programmes.

But what we now need to do is review the functions of the Country Office from the advocacy role we hope that they will play in terms of the National Human Development Reports, the national poverty action plans, and the emphasis on mainstreaming human rights and democracy. We need to look at the institution-building work we do at the country level through to up-stream policy advice across the whole spectrum of regulatory and institutional challenges our country partners face.

We also need to continually refine and reinforce the role of the Resident Coordinator and our relations with the broader UN agency community, and -- where necessary -- continue to strengthen our role in post-conflict coordination and support, to our new partnerships with the private sectors and Civil Society Organizations. To all of this we need now to determine clear guidelines to our field colleagues how to put together a country office whose priorities and structure will be recognizable from Mali to Moscow.

In that regard, I am also planning and have underway the creation of a new Administrator website which will be a means for I and my senior colleagues to communicate directly with all of our Resident Representatives around the world. It will make us all similar partners in an inter-active debated, experimented model of change, which reaches out into the furthest regional geographic tentacles of our organization. Because sometimes New York seems a long, long way away. Whenever I make visits to the field that there is not yet sufficient engagement by all of our field offices in this vision and the increasingly clear blueprint we have for how we want to drive change in the Organization.

THE NEW UNDP VISION

So I will argue to you that at a managerial level, this has been a year of action. But there is still certainly some confusion -- even inside UNDP, and certainly beyond -- on exactly what are these new functions around which we are seeking to focus the Organization. And for simplicity of reporting back to your capitals, let me say it all lies in one simple algebraic phrase: a2 and p2. The a2 is advocacy and advice, the p2 is pilots and partnerships. And let me just quickly say a word about each.

Advocacy

Under advocacy, I think you have all seen how we have sought to use the slipstream created by the doubts raised in so many forums about the direction of globalization. Not globalization yes or no -- I think all the forums that we at least have been engaged in recognize its inevitability. But increasingly there is a desire for alternative viewpoints or alternative perspectives, for the widening of the debate on how globalization rolls out across the global economy and society and particularly how globalization includes the poor.

In this context, the global advocacy which we are able to do using the Human Development Report and serving as the spokespeople for UN development cooperation gives us a special voice and pulpit and authority to develop alternative ideas. To widen and engage the debate on whither globalization. But beneath it, at a national level, there is an equally active dimension for UNDP. Through the National Human Development Reports -- of which we did 75 last year -- we are helping countries frame the debate about policy choices to compare year on year, region by region, their performance in improvement of education, in delivery of basic health services, of job creation, and other vital statistics in the fight against poverty at the national and sub-national level. And we have now formed a National Human Development Report Unit, linked both to BDP and to our HDR Office -- and of course our country offices -- to make sure that we can provide expert support to the quality of the National Human Development Reports at the country level.

Advice

Beyond advocacy -- and in sense at least partly in response to demand created by advocacy -- comes this policy advice role that we have talked about so much this year. And as I have said throughout, this is not some pipe dream of an Administrator and his management team; the ROAR has demonstrated that this is where country demand lies. It is where you, the programme countries, wish us to concentrate our efforts. And therefore it is extremely important that as we focus on legal, political and regulatory frameworks and on capacity building that we build up our own in-house capacity.

But more broadly we must also rely on the partnerships we maintain with specialized agencies and others to provide the capacity to deliver that policy advice in a high caliber way. And as we have also argued it is not an advice which is limited just to our own priority sectors. It is critical to us to be able to deliver that advice in sectors where we do not maintain our own independent policy expertise, where we can draw on our UN partners to offer support in the education sector or the environment sector or other areas, using experts who are not our own, but are our partners within the system.

Pilots

In terms of the pilots, it is clear -- and I think has been to everybody -- that we have no intention of getting out of project work. When we talk about policy, not projects, what we mean is turning the purpose and focus of our projects from how many beneficiaries can they lift out of poverty in a direct to how effective can they can be in acting as a catalyst for mainstreaming an important new policy agenda? The challenge now to all our colleagues is, when you design a project the judgement that we will make on it is: is it mainstreamable? Is it innovating or piloting an idea which if successful will be interpreted and mainstreamed into national policy? Because it is in that role that our real impact lies.

Partnerships

The fourth function is this partnership one. And in that sense, it is extremely clear to us that partnerships start with the UN Development Group bedrock relationships that we have – that are such an important part of the Secretary General’s reform initiative. And indeed there are now 100 UN country teams currently preparing common country assessments. There are 75 UNDAFs on the way. There will be 40 UN Houses by the end of the year. Almost half of the Resident Coordinators are been now selected through the inter-agency process and have undergone the inter-agency competency test. And all of this against the background, like so much of the change here, of a 35% reduction in funds available for the Resident Coordinator functions.

Yet it is not enough to make just that central set of partnerships work. There are abroader set of circles of partners that must also work for us. And some of them are new arrangements, such as where we are deliberately moving to take UNSO and some of environmental staff and co-locate them in Nairobi near to UNEP, so that we can start drawing more completely on the environmental expertise of UNEP. Similarly, when Gro Brundtland and Juan Somavia address you in the seminar that we have organized later this week, the whole purpose of this is to demonstrate the new partnerships that are developing between the specialized agencies and ourselves.

I should also emphasize that this is not the old debate of specialized agency execution versus national execution. We recognize from the ROAR and much else that national execution will remain the dominant implementation model. Rather it is to see as how we can assemble the policy teams to meet those national execution requirements, and to draw on our expertise within the specialized agencies to offer a more coherent, multisectoral UN team response to the needs of the programme countries. The value of these partnerships obviously starts with coherence for the programme countries. It is in that co-ordinator function of UNDP -- being able to offer a common effort – that a lot of value lies.

That total approach, however, includes resources. And I think the partnership that we have developed over the last year with the World Bank and the IMF is of striking importance in terms of the strategic resource flow to our developing country partners. The approach also involves troops -- if I can refer those wonderful volunteers of UNV using such a militaristic term -- and the ability of UNV to deploy very large numbers of people both in special situations and more regular development situations behind the goals of UNDP and the broader country team. And it involves specialist expertise from UNIFEM and CDF, but also from other agencies UNEP, FAO and others.

It also involves leverage: I mentioned the World Bank and the extraordinary progress that has been made in terms of country level pilot partnerships around the PRSPs with both the World Bank and IMF in Tanzania and other countries. I think it clearly shows that despite the inherent risks the partnership is worth it. We have the opportunity of really ensuring that macro-economic strategy and resources are oriented to meet the goals of poverty reduction as well as growth. And even if we do not get our way on every point, we can be in there as council for the defence, helping our programme country partners with their own arguments in terms of their poverty strategy.

Cutting Back and Moving Forward

But also frankly, these partnerships are about where we will cut. And for those of you who doubted you would ever hear a list of functions we would cut, pick up your pencils, because we will cut in the area of forestry, health except HIV/AIDS, education, sanitation, transport and fisheries. UNDP plans to give up independent policy expertise in those sectors as well as others. Not however because UNDP policy and capacity-building role will not touch on those sectors, obviously as Resident Coordinator, obviously as leaders of the UN development operational activities, we will touch on those sectors, but we will draw our expertise in those areas from others. We no longer believe that to have expertise you need to contain it within you own four walls.

So we will focus on our own activities. And through partnerships we will find the technical support for areas which we no longer prioritise for ourselves. Overlaying these four functional pillars -- advice, advocacy, pilots and partnerships -- is a substantive platform of practice areas where we do plan to specialise. And I think in the last year we have discussed them quite a lot. So I’m not going to go through them or reopen old debates. But I think in the areas of governance, in the areas of the Special Development Situations, and in the effort to ensure that environment, gender and poverty are consistent mainstream priorities and dimensions of everything we do, we have found a focus we can all agree to. And I do plan one additional priority for UNDP going forward – an issue that in the eleven-and-a-half months that I have been at the organisation has week by week grown in importance and urgency. And that is for UNDP to take on the mantle within the UN development family of the leader for Information Technology for development.