Jackson did not, however, operate in historical isolation. In fact, it was precisely the historical moment in which he conducted his investigations that informed his managerial stance. The bodies Jackson surveyed including the UNDP, UN Children’s Fund, and UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), had turned the UN ‘into what is probably the most complex organisation in the world’.369 Yet as Jackson intimated throughout his report, that
complexity itself resulted from massive geopolitical upheavals in the preceding decade. National struggles for independence throughout the Third World had led to many newly independent states joining the UN from the mid-1950s onwards. From its 51 founding members in 1945, the organisation had almost doubled in membership by 1960, the year in which Nigeria, Senegal, and the Congo were admitted. Also in that year, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 1514 (XV) affirming the right of all peoples to self-determination.
However, it was not only numbers that challenged the UN infrastructure. Since its creation, the UN had, in the words of one British official, embodied ‘an Alliance of the Great Powers embedded in a universal organisation’.370 In 1945, many European powers retained their colonial administrations over vast territories in the Global South while other areas were classified under the old League of Nations mandate system. Therefore, and as Mazower recounts, the new UN organisation was ‘a product of empire’ offering a ‘more than adequate mechanism for its defence’.371 Not anticipating the degree of Third World resistance to imperial rule, the founders of the UN were therefore unprepared for the geographical and political bloc which emerged inside the organisation once decolonisation began.
369 UNDP Capacity Report, iii.
370 Charles Webster, quoted in M. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological
Origins of the United Nations (Princeton UP 2009) 7.
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As far as the West was concerned, recent additions to the UN family did not pose any great upset to the existing balance of power in the early 1960s. This was despite the accelerating rate at which nations were gaining independence and the historic occasion of the 1955 conference at Bandung.372 Geopolitics continued to be plotted on an East-West axis with the so-called ‘uncommitted third’ drawing little attention except as satellites or stages for proxy wars between the US and the Soviet Union.373 Yet as postcolonial states found a collective voice, particularly with the formation of the Group of 77 (G77) in June 1964, the UN began to shift from ‘an instrument of empire into an anti-colonial forum’.374
Already by the mid-1960s, the G77 comprised a numerical majority within the General Assembly and began to counterbalance Western institutional advantage by creating new bodies such as the UNDP, UNCTAD, and UNIDO. This strategy was part of an early move to realign the power of Western states and corporations and fed into the nascent Third World agenda known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Through the NIEO, Third World states lobbied for changes to the international trade and development regimes, international shipping, industrialisation policy, and the treatment of multinational companies. These radical calls commenced in fora such as the southern-dominated UNCTAD in 1964. By the time of UNCTAD’s second conference in New Delhi in 1968, though, Western states had failed to take any steps to undo their dominant bargaining position as centres of production, blocking reform to commodity pricing, import tariffs, and debt agreements. UNIDO and the UNDP had fared slightly better in their activities, but also attracted attention as sprawling administrations with an overtly political agenda.
This is the context in which Jackson was commissioned to investigate UNDP: to enhance the UN’s development capacity through greater cooperation between the UN and the Third World, and to increase its financial resources. For Jackson, it was imperative that ‘the plight of two-thirds of mankind [not] be swept under the political rug and left there’.375 In this regard, Jackson’s managerial proposals, although minor, were designed to ensure the realisation of the development agenda through an efficient UN system.
372 Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, 24 April 1955
http://franke.uchicago.edu/Final_Communique_Bandung_1955.pdf.
373 H. Grimal, Decolonization: The British, Dutch, and Belgian Empires, 1919-1963 (Routledge and Kegan Paul
1978) 175–7, cited in M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Penguin Books 2012) 261.
374 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 25. 375 UNDP Capacity Report, x.
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Jackson’s proposals can be seen as feeding the broader Third World agenda to secure the effectiveness of southern-dominated institutions.376 By 1974, the centrality of such
institutions to the NIEO had been enshrined in the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, and its Programme for Action. Acknowledging the ‘continuing severe economic imbalance’ between North and South, the General Assembly advanced changes to the international regime in the trade of raw materials and commodities, the international monetary system, and development financing among others. It called for a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States and for establishing a principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources.377 The Declaration positioned the UN at the core of this radical project:
The UN as a universal organisation should be capable of dealing with problems of international economic cooperation in a comprehensive manner and ensuring equally the interests of all countries. It must have an even greater role in the establishment of a new international economic order.378
As radical as its aims were, the NIEO project would still live or die by the institutions charged with its execution: UNCTAD, yes, but also UNDP, and the Economic and Social Council. Given that most of the NIEO project never came to pass, the question thus turns to what happened to such institutions, and what, if anything, management had to do with it.