Against the background of mounting financial problems, the UN is currently undertaking a major review of its organization and tasks, the results of which could lead to substantive changes and improved performances in the amalgam of decision making mechanisms and administrative structures that have evolved incrementally over the past 40 years. The special issue of PAD focuses on the often neglected role of the UN as an agent of economic and social development, and brings together a number of senior professional UN staff who have been operationally involved in programming, management improvement, evaluative research, policy support and programme management. In their essays the authors examine the evolving patterns of UN development functions and the crisis of governance, the machinery and agenda of internal management improvement and the achievements of two major and contrasting structural changes in recent years - the strengthening of the "common" personnel system through the establishment of the International Civil Service Commission and the extension of the development capacity of the Secretariat by a degree of decentralization to the Regional Commissions.
Particular attention is paid to the working of the UN office for Emergency Operations in Africa, an undertaking that has important implications for the machinery or service delivery in the field in the context of crisis. Drawing lessons from these innovations and from the various organizational reviews that have taken place within the UN since the late 1960s, the collection seeks to make a contribution towards an understanding of the political, institutional and technical correlates of effective planning and implementation of management improvement under the special conditions of a global development organization.
- ISBN10 0471914592
- ISBN13 9780471914594
- Publish Date 5 August 1987
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 14 March 1991
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
- Imprint John Wiley & Sons Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 120
- Language English