Speech transcript - Bruce Jenks

							Speech transcript - Bruce Jenks
7 September Afternoon Panel Session
“In Larger Freedom: The Challenge of Partnerships”

Thank you very much. Let me first start by passing on to you Kemal Dervis’ personal
apologies for not being here. He very much wanted to be here. He started as
Administrator all of two weeks ago and is experiencing what we do to our
Administrators, which is we normally about triple book them. But when one of the
bookings is to be on an airplane, it does create complications and that was the case this
time around. I think for those of you that know him or know of him, I think you know of
his deep commitment to the partnership agenda and to civil society in particular. Some of
you may have come across his book and also as you, Madam Chair mentioned at the
beginning, he has already, in his early statements, stressed the great importance that he
attaches to developing these partnerships and in particular with civil society. So I think
there is no where he would have preferred to be than here at this time.

I am going to try and make a few remarks on the way we, from the point of view of the
United Nations Development Programme, from an operational programme, how we see
this partnership agenda, what I think is called “The Challenge of Partnerships” and why
for us it is so absolutely fundamental to the direction that we’re trying to go. And let me
just say, on a personal note, that when I was appointed to this job by Mark Malloch
Brown in the year 2000, it was actually to create this bureau called the Bureau of
Partnerships. We transformed something that was formerly known as “External
Relations” into a partnership bureau thinking that what we needed in today’s world was
partnerships, not external relations. I don’t want to say that we don’t need any external
relations, but there is a very important shift in the emphasis and in what we’re trying to
do.

I think we’re all very familiar with the basic idea that as we move forward over the last
couple of decades, the need to reach out, the importance of different actors in society has
become much more important and the need to simply beyond interstate relations and the
focus on governments. I think we all, well, it is clear that we need to move beyond that.
The importance of governments and national programmes are certainly fundamental, but
the idea that that’s all that we need to deal with clearly is something that we’ve passed.
Coming from a development perspective, there’s another angle to why partnerships are
more than just the latest fad or more than mere rhetoric. And that is, if you look at the
70s and 80s, development assistance, development cooperation, was largely conceived as
an interstate form of collaboration and it was a collaboration that essentially was
rewarding your allies in a world where you rewarded your friends and you kept your
enemies at a distance. And if you look at aid flows, they have much more to do with the
Cold War and other types of alliance than they do with any sense of development
objectives. What was so exciting for everybody in the development field with the 1990s
and the end of the Cold War, was a sense that we could move beyond that kind of world
and that we could move to a time when we could actually look at development objectives
and we would actually start caring about whether we achieved something or not, as
opposed to whether we were simply rewarding our friends. And I do believe that the
move in the 90s to the definition of “development objectives,” culminating in the
Millennium Summit of 2000 and the articulation of the Millennium Development Goals
was the kind of high point in this move towards really focusing on objectives. In
brackets let me say that it is therefore particularly sad that the 1990s was the first decade
in the last half-century where aid flows were completely stagnant. If you look at the
flows in the 60s, in the 70s, in the 80s, if you look more or less at the first year and the
last year of the decade, on average, aid flows went up by about 200 per cent over the
decade. All of a sudden, if you look at 1990 and compare it to 2000, in nominal terms,
I’m not even talking real terms, in nominal terms it is actually pretty much exactly the
same number. In other words, the moment when we started to focus on actually making a
difference and really achieving objectives, all of a sudden, the money began to dry up.
And that’s why, the MDGs, we believe, and the Millennium Summit is so very important
because it was to try and put energy back into this agenda and to try and get people
excited about it.

Now, it’s very obvious that, if you start to focus on objectives and you move away from
an obsession of being able to tell your ally how much money you dispersed, when you
start to move to that objective, you actually have to change the way you work because
you can’t achieve certain objectives by going at it alone. You can’t achieve common
objectives unless you work with the various partners who are positioned to make a
difference, starting of course, with the national actors and the national governments. If
the purpose is simply to show your allies you’re spending a lot of money just to spend
money, you can actually do that and pretty much not talk to anybody and that went on for
several decades, more or less. So there is a fundamental issue of why partnership has
come into the development agenda and I believe it goes very deep and it is not a matter
purely of rhetoric.

And therefore, I think that when we look at the UN-type agendas that we’ve been living
over the past five years, it’s not just a bunch of reports that have the politically correct
language. What we’re seeing is something deeper that’s going into the kind of
discussions and the kind of discourse that we have here in the UN. It was certainly the
case if you look at that seminal report that was produced by the Secretary-General for the
Millennium Summit which I think was a real breakthrough in terms of reaching out,
showing a more extrovert United Nations, a United Nations that somehow understood
much better that we needed to reach out, that we needed partners to achieve the common
vision. And I think that that report is again reflected and resonates in In Larger Freedom
and of course, if we look at the work of the Cardoso Report, and if we look at the spirit of
the June hearings that just occurred, I think that what we’re seeing is a very important
reaching out of what is after all, fundamentally, an intergovernmental system reaching
out to actors recognizing that we can’t achieve what we need to without bringing
everybody into play. Now we can have lots of arguments and lots of discussions on all
these different reports that I’ve just mentioned, some will love them, some will hate
them, some will think they did the right thing and some that they didn’t do the right thing,
but the important thing is that it’s out there and I think this is a different world from the
one that you would have been observing five, ten years ago. I should say ten years go
because this really started towards the end of the 90s.
If I look at the agenda which has already been referred to, which is so fundamental and is
being negotiated in the next room, the agenda on the Millennium Development Goals, it
becomes so very clear why you can’t have such an agenda if it’s not working hand-in-
glove with civil society. The whole concept of the MDGs, of collecting this data, of
understanding the trends, of analyzing it, of mobilizing around it, involves a degree of
social mobilization which only really civil society can deliver on. It also involves a level
of policy dialogue which is absolutely fundamental and where civil society hasn’t a
critical role to play. We in the development business love to talk about national
ownership, you know, you can’t start talking about anything if you don’t start with the
words “national ownership”. And national ownership, actually what it means, is choice.
You can’t have ownership if you don’t have choice. Ownership cannot mean that you
sign the dotted line of a document that’s produced and some (inaudible). It’s got to mean
that you go through the choices, you have disagreements, you fight about things
sometimes and then democratically you come to some kind of decision about the choice
that you make. And civil society is fundamental to the articulation of choice. We cannot
have that kind of a construction if you don’t have the ability to articulate different
visions, different options with different pros and cons in the process.

Similarly we cannot get there without deep levels of participation and I think it’s my
partner right here next to me, Vicky, who has eloquently talked about both the
feminization and the indigenization, if I got it right, of poverty. These are issues which
can only be approached and tackled through full participation and the full involvement of
civil society. And then, of course, civil society has traditionally had a role in delivery, in
the actual delivery of services, but I deliberately leave that to last because while it’s very
important, it’s often the thing that we talk about the most in our business and I’m not sure
it should be the thing, actually that we talk about the most.

If I then move to the issue of how then have we in UNDP reached out, in other words, is
this just rhetoric or have we actually practiced and of this? Let me refer to a number of
the major initiatives, in particular those with relationship to the MDGs, where certainly
we have intended to reach out. I say intended because we’re always going to be
criticized, country office to country office for not having delivered, but we know what
we’re trying to get to and I’ll mention two specifically.

The first area is that as part of our contribution, and I’m talking not just about UNDP, but
the whole United Nations’ Development Group, as part of our contribution to this effort
of mobilizing around the MDGs, we launched with national actors, or I should say that
hopefully national actors launched with our support, what we call “MDG national
reports” in every country. And the idea was to collect this data and to really mobilize
energy and dialogue around the data that was coming out. What can be more powerful
than to start seeing the start figures of why in one region education targets are being
reached, in another region they are not. In one neighbouring country they are, in another
they are not. It really gives rise to a political debate and it also gives rise to a debate
ultimately about governance as well because the question is whether people are being
cared for, whether programmes are actually working and the right effects are occurring.
In this process of reaching out, we have been very clear that civil society has a critical
role to play. Now if you ask my colleagues here, they will probably say to you that we
failed miserably and we still have our res. reps that close their doors and don’t reach out
in the way that they should. But we are convinced that we do need to reach out and we
do have many that do open the doors and we’ll need to keep working on the ones that
don’t. We’ll just have to rip the doors down, I guess.

The other major area that I would focus on is on the Millennium Campaign. I think Salil
Shetty is coming and talking, maybe its tomorrow, but that’s another very important
effort. I won’t talk about it since he will, but it’s one which we have strongly supported
and it’s one which we call our “core programme” of trying to reach out and support the
MDGs.

Madame Chair, you referred to your particular background and your particular
collaboration with United Nations Volunteers. I just as an aside wanted to mention I was
in Bonn a couple of months ago because they were having their, I think every four or five
years, they have their global UNV meeting of all the Volunteers throughout the world
and it’s an incredible collection of energy that you see when you see all those Volunteers.
And I just wanted to share with you one little thing which struck me. As I was preparing
for that meeting I happened to come across a dictionary lying around in the house and I
realized that the origin of the word “volunteer” comes, I guess, from the French and the
Latin, it comes out of voluntarism, or the exorcise of will and I found that extremely
interesting because I kind of associate, at least subconsciously, volunteer with getting
something for free or getting something cheap or whatever it is, which probably is a
reflection of me, but I’ll leave that to your imagination. But it’s so much deeper than
that. Actually, volunteerism is a particular expression of voluntarism and voluntarism is
really a state of mind and I thought that was quite fascinating and it makes you think back
to these explosions of, explosion is the wrong word, these tremendous outbursts of
humanity and good will that we see around tsunami or currently in New Orleans where
you see the abilities of when people reach out. So I just wanted to express that thought
because I think that in our reaching out to civil society, I actually think that we have a
very strong programme with the United Nations Volunteers, but we could be so much
more ambitious in terms of the ability that lies behind it. And I know that my colleagues
in Bonn see it exactly that way as well.

Let me also mention briefly a couple of specific initiatives that we are pushing forward
and I’ll just mention three at this point. One is that, if you look at In Larger Freedom and
if you look at what is currently going on for next week for the Summit, one of the really
core positions is the idea of making the poverty reduction strategies at the country level
MDG friendly or MDG subservient, which is probably the right word. We are really
committed to this proposition coming out of the Summit, irrespective of the language that
gets negotiated, at the country level of really trying to push this agenda forward. I think
that maybe the most helpful thing that the Millennium Project did, led by Jeff Sachs and
his team, was to take on this issue that you cannot have, in all the poorest countries of the
world, poverty reduction strategies which start from the assumption that there is not
enough money to reach the Millennium Development Goals in those countries. And yet,
in poverty reduction strategy after poverty reduction strategy, if you look at the analysis,
they are constructed on a financial envelope that has nowhere close to the ambition of
reaching the Millennium Development Goals. And before we make the error of getting
too excited about the Millennium Development Goals, let us remember firstly that they
were set as a trajectory on the existing trends in the 1990s that was the level of ambition.
It was not to increase the trajectory, it was just that it would continue to perform at the
level of the 1990s which of course we have failed to do. So I think that it’s really very
important when we look at this to be careful about recognizing that this is a very doable
proposition. So we are going to move forward and we are actually working with NGO
colleagues and with governments to try and put programmes in place that will enable us
to make a real difference on this.

The Millennium Project challenged poverty reduction strategies and it challenged our
colleagues at the Bank and others who worked very hard on this. It challenged them to
make sure that at least when poverty reduction strategies were being conceived that there
would be two scenarios in the strategy. One scenario is within the existing financial
envelope, this is the level of poverty reduction that you can attain. And this other
scenario is the amount of resources that would be required if you wanted to actually reach
the Millennium Development Goals. And it’s that second scenario that we want to see
built into every poverty reduction strategy.

The other initiative that I would refer to is that following from the Cardoso Report, and
despite the fact that I think there is not agreement on the follow-up, we are committed
within the United Nations Development Group to implement focal points in all of our
country offices to build relations with civil society at the country level. We have a
working group that is currently working to achieve that.

I think I’m probably running over time, but let me make a final observation. As we sit
here today in this room, it is quite extraordinary that there’s so much else going on in the
building right now and I’m now going to make a terrible error and forget some terribly
important meeting, but let me just mention three meetings that I’m aware of today. The
first was the UNDP launch of the Human Development Report this morning in a room
just upstairs. And the Human Development Report, the national Human Development
Reports, this advocacy function is something that brings us in the United Nations very
close I think to you in civil society and I think it’s something that points to how important
this partnership is. Then, in some other room, I’m not quite sure where they are right
now, as you know they’re negotiating the text of the Summit Meeting and there’s no
doubt that when we look at the expected outcomes, whether it’s the MDGs or the poverty
reduction strategies, whether it’s the Peacebuilding Commission, whether it’s the Human
Rights Agenda which is getting a significant boost, whether it’s the Democracy Fund
which is being advocated, which ever area that you look in there is no doubt that we will
make no progress unless we work hand-in-glove with civil society. And finally, while
not currently in this building, somewhere in another part of Manhattan, Mr. Volcker and
his colleagues were presenting their report. And let me say, as a final word, that really
what transparency means, really what accountability means is being an outward,
extrovert organization that is reaching out all the time and which is working in
partnership. There is obviously a stricter version that has to be looked after in terms of
the financial accountability, but the broader issue is to be accountable in that very broad
sense and to be transparent in that very broad sense. And therefore, I dare say that when
we come through the Summit and we move forward into the agendas and the reform
agendas that we’re going to have to look at, the extrovert, outreach United Nations is the
one that’s going to have to win the day.

Thank you.