What Kind of International Public Service Do We Need for the Twenty-first Century?

Abstract

In the fall of 2007, at the Sixty-second General Assembly of the United Nations, where reform of the organization was a major issue, two ideas converged about the staff of the UN system. Ban Ki-moon, in his first report on the organization stated: When it comes to the reform of the of the Organization, we will need to be ambitious while at the same time focused and disciplined. We will also need to maximize the tremendous potential of our biggest asset--a diverse and dedicated staff. To fully leverage this key asset, we must build a staff is truly mobile, multifunctional and accountable, with more emphasis on career development and training. And it means holding all United Nations employees to the highest standards of integrity and ethical behaviour, both at Headquarters and in the field. (1) At the same time, four countries (Chile, South Africa, Sweden, and Thailand), under the Four Nations Initiative in Towards a Compact: Proposals for Improved Governance and Management of the United Nations Secretariat, made a proposal (number 28) that ways and means be devised for the UN, as a knowledge-based organization, to develop long-term visions for human resource issues as a whole. (2) In explaining this, the report stated, Such a vision should look at what a future international civil service should encompass, taking into account all the demands and complexities of the UN in the 21st A vision should be informed by experience and good practice of other large knowledge-based organizations. At the same time it must be based on the UN Charter and the international character of the UN. It is important the principles of transparency and accountability are maintained, as well as the proper division of responsibility between Member States and the Secretariat. The formulation of such a vision should take into account the unique nature of the Organization and should not compete with ongoing efforts of reform in the field of human resources. It would be complementary, facilitating the long-term direction of efforts for improvement. (3) Similar concerns are being expressed in the other organizations of the United Nations system, including the Bretton Woods institutions, where new executive heads are calling for reform. The international civil service, one of the main institutional innovations of the twentieth century, started with the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. (4) There has been a clear evolution in tasks and status as well as significant growth. At the same time, the international civil service has not been immune to the criticisms leveled at national civil services. In a sense, with their rules, permanent contracts, and hierarchical structures, they seem out of date in a world seems to believe in business models, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and outsourcing as the ideal for organizations. International civil service is, if a Western teenager were to be asked, so twentieth century. A conceptual basis for the international civil service derives from Max Weber, the nineteenth-century sociologist who formulated the concept of bureaucracy and bureaucratic authority. While he was describing the emergence of the modern German state based on administrations followed rules and were neutral within their context, we are looking not at a state but something unique and twentieth-century--a public authority is not sovereign but still delicers transterritorial services. The analogy still works: Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, for example, used the Weberian approach in their influential study Rules for the World. (5) The international public sector, unlike the national, lacks most of the attributes of state power: it has no armies, collects no taxes, and imposes no fines. What it does is exercise certain functions, delegated to it by states, preserve international order, without which states themselves would not function except at great cost. …