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Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas

Perspectives from the UN Regional Commissions

Indiana University Press

Unity and Diversity of Development: The Regional Commissions' Experience

Yves Berthelot

• The Major Contribution of the Regional Commissions: A Regional Culture

• Five Battles for a Single Mandate

• Responding to Regional Needs: Cohesion, Development, and Integration

• The Regional Commissions as the UN's Regional Arm

• Looking toward the Future: Are the Regional Commissions Still Needed?

In the constellation of the United Nations (UN), the regional commissions are very special stars. Multisectoral, they illustrate the sectoral richness and complexity of the development process; regional in scope, they stress by their very existence the importance in development of initial conditions, institutions, and the societal dimension; and by the regional representation of their governing bodies, they bring to the UN an authentic regional voice. They recall the necessity of understanding the historical context of the socioeconomic problems for which they are searching for effective policies and strategies. Automatically, they go against the neoclassical approach that, in its tendency to prescribe "one-size-fits-all" policies, plays down the role of cumulative socioeconomic processes as a constraint on policymakers' freedom of action. By the same token, they go against a tendency of some entities in the UN system to jump to global conclusions without first assessing whether the regional building blocks really add up to a coherent global approach.

For these reasons, the regional commissions are similar and different. This chapter highlights both their differences and their similarities by examining in turn a regional culture; battles for mandates; cohesion, development, and integration; actions as the UN's regional arm; and visions of the future. It draws on the five following chapters while not pretending to offer a systematic summing up of their content. In fact, each regional chapter should be considered as self-contained and this introductory chapter as a reflection of the views of the author, enriched and amended by those expressed in the regional chapters. The aim of this volume being to assess the regional commissions' contribution to the intellectual history of the UN, it is appropriate to make some general points about the approach followed. This will clarify the multiple links between an institution and the ideas it produces.

Regional Commissions: The Intertwined Histories of Ideas and Institutions

Writing an intellectual history of an institution is an extraordinarily difficult task. As with an individual, such a history cannot be restricted to asking whether or not important new ideas were produced in the course of its work. Significant contributions are in any case difficult to identify: Their recognition is subject to variable time lags, their relative importance is frequently revised (especially in the social sciences), and disputes over parentage are not uncommon. Most innovators stand on the shoulders of their (often forgotten) predecessors, and diligent scholars usually have little difficulty in finding historical precedents for even the most radical of "new" ideas. Any claims to originality must therefore be tentative and made with considerable care and modesty. But it must also be questioned whether the production of new ideas and original contributions is actually the most appropriate criterion for assessing the intellectual contribution and influence of an international economic institution. Influence may derive not from specific, seminal ideas but from a particular mindset or general approach to analyzing problems and making policy recommendations. Such a mindset would comprise not only a conceptual apparatus but also assumptions about how economies actually work and value judgments, explicit or implicit, about such matters as income distribution, the acceptability of specific tradeoffs (inflation versus unemployment), and general questions concerning the social outcomes of economic activity. Such a perspective on the economic and social world may be very influential, and when it is accepted by large numbers of those subject to its influence, and especially when it reflects the views of the most powerful members of the economic system, it begins to approach a type of Gramscian cuitural hegemony. Thus, there is hardly anything that can be regarded as original among the individual components of the neoliberal or Washington Consensus as formulated after the debt crisis of the 1980s, but, whether or not one agrees with it, it would be difficult to deny that the synthesis has had a major influence on economic policies in much of the world in the last two decades. But even here there are still questions: Does the particular mindset arise from work done in the institution itself or is the institution a conduit for diffusing ideas from its member governments or from the academic world? And can we trace a relationship between the economic analysis and policy proposals made in international bodies and the economic policies actually pursued in individual countries? International officials often like to claim (or seek) a direct influence on national policymakers, but they should heed Professor Winch's warning that this involves "both an over-optimistic conception of the technocratic status of economics, and a naive view of the processes of political decision making."

Much of the economic analysis carried out in the regional commissions, and in most other international organizations for that matter, is unlikely to turn up in the usual citation indexes of academic work that tend to reflect specific contributions to relatively narrow fields of specialization. In contrast, one of the main tasks of such organizations is to assess what is currently happening in the regional or global economies, to judge how matters may develop in the next eighteen months or so, to review the appropriateness of current policies, and to warn of possible dangers. Such regular conjunctural analysis, if given a sense of direction by a coherent mindset, can help to develop a general framework of ideas, which may have a significant influence on national and international policymakers. The propagation of neoliberal ideas in the 1980s and 1990s was greatly assisted by the regular biannual assessments of the current economic outlook published by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). At the same time, the regular analyses of departments within the UN, such as the regional commissions and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), although they appear to be much less influential, have helped to maintain a degree of skepticism toward much of the Washington Consensus and thus to preserve a measure of healthy debate over economic policies. Whether the latter bodies will gain in influence will depend to a large extent on economic developments and whether the ruling consensus is seen to remain relevant to the problems that require solution. From this point of view, it is important that coherent alternatives or amendments to the current consensus are readily available when the need for change is recognized.

Thus, it is important that at least some institutions recognize what Seamus Heaney has called "the necessity to confront the ruling intellectual pressures with a counter reality," even at the risk of being unfashionable or, at least in the short run, without apparent influence. This is an apposite injunction for the secretariat of the UN, the charter of which opens with "we the peoples of the United Nations," not "we the governments." This implies, to twist an observation of Montaigne, that we must pay attention to those who are subject to policy and not just to the governments that make it. Bulent Ecevit once remarked that progress is only possible with "constructive skepticism," which is only possible with "free thinking that allows one to perceive the changes taking place in the world more quickly than someone who inclines to be committed to certain fixed explanations and stands." This is a disciplined, not a destructive, skepticism which is given a sense of direction by a clear understanding of the ultimate purposes of the economic system and of the value premises which underpin them. Of all the outstanding people who led the UN secretariat in the early postwar years, the one who articulated this point of view most clearly was Gunnar Myrdal, the first executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). And in assessing the intellectual contributions of the various departments of the UN to international policy discussion, at least one of the attributes we should be looking for is a capacity for "constructive skepticism."

Institutions, as von Hayek and von Mises insisted, evolve, and in general they evolve gradually. Their history and the initial conditions in which they were created are therefore important. Both their agendas and policy orientations show strong continuities over time. There would appear to be good reasons for this. First, many of the fundamental problems are never "finally" solved — instead they constantly resurface in one form or another. How should change be managed and the costs of adjustment be distributed? How can productivity be improved? Can government intervention improve economic outcomes? How far should domestic economies adjust to the dictates of the international economy? How should the international monetary system be managed? Second, secretariats acquire comparative advantages in certain areas, and these specializations are reinforced over time. And third, institutional memory involves, among other things, the transmission from one generation to the next of certain intellectual attitudes and approaches, often implicitly. In the case of the regional commissions, initial conditions and their first years of activity have had a considerable and long-lasting influence on their activity, and for this reason it was not always possible to clearly separate the history of ideas from the history of the institution itself.

Five Regional Cultures

In subsequent chapters, the reader will discover that each of the regional commissions has developed its own culture that has guided its actions, analyses, and policy recommendations.

• Under Gunnar Myrdal's leadership, the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) from its earliest days sought a middle way between the neoclassical approach and the Marxist alternative, which continental Western Europe translated into the so-called social market economy of the 1950S-1960S. The secretariat believed in indicative planning and state intervention to correct market failure and guide economic development. For more than fifty years, it sustained the idea of an undivided Europe by constructing and maintaining a bridge between its western and eastern halves, even when no other institution was able or willing to do so and when the prospect of achieving it was far more remote than it appeared at the end of the 1980s.

• Under P. S. Lokanathan s leadership, the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), despite the immensity of its territory, the lengthy decolonization process, the divisions of the Cold War, and the outbreak of actual wars, had a profound sense of the necessary unity of the region and held firmly that decisions concerning it should only be made by countries in the region. The ECAFE secretariat was convinced that member countries were responsible for their own development and, therefore, had to design their strategies and mobilize their own resources, public and private, through planning. Regional integration was seen as an indispensable complement to this process. In becoming the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and focusing more on technical assistance, the commission lost its institutional and intellectual leadership. But, borrowing the title of a pamphlet that Lokanathan published in 1954, it continued to be "The Economic Parliament of Asia."

• Under Raul Prebisch, the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), sought to modify the region s integration into the world economy by overcoming the asymmetry of trade benefits in favor of the developed countries through industrialization and regional cooperation. Benefiting from its relative homogeneity, ECLA developed, and maintained when it became ECLAC, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, an exceptional level of policy debates within the secretariat and between the secretariat and member states. It is the quality of these debates that permitted the commission to adapt its model to new circumstances and to reject a narrow technical view of economics in favor of an interdisciplinary approach integrating economics, sociology, and politics.

• Created in 1958 after protracted debates, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), was effectively deprived from i960 to 1963 of the leadership of its first two executive secretaries, successively Mekki Abbas and Robert Gardiner, who were sent to Congo as the special representatives of the UN Secretary-General. Nevertheless, in its resolute fight for decolonization, it forged the conviction that Africa alone should decide the future of the continent. Marked by the political decision to respect the boundaries inherited from the colonial era and conscious of the narrow economic base of so many small countries and the cultural diversity in the continent, the ECA was equally convinced of the necessity for regional and subregional cooperation. It never abandoned these convictions and created a large number of integrating entities. But, faced with the multiple needs of its members and the multiple pressures exerted on African governments by donor countries and the international financial institutions, the commission failed to establish clear priorities, confused resolutions with action, and waited too long before forging a coherent African strategy of self-reliance. Although adopted, the strategy was not implemented, in particular because, contrary to the World Bank, the commission lacked the financial resources to back it. In the 1990s, the commission turned to more concrete priorities such as strengthening the managerial and negotiating capacities of its members and increasing their awareness of the strategic choices to be made in particular domains.

• Despite the small size of its region and the common cultural and religious heritage of its members, the Economic Commission for Western Asia (ECWA), was conscious of the tensions within the region that frequently resulted in wars and civil strife. Its first executive secretary, Mohammed Said Al-Attar, and his successors were therefore convinced that the main role of the commission was to promote regional cooperation, a conviction reinforced by the fact that many natural obstacles to development could be effectively addressed only in a regional context. Divergences among member countries were such that reference to UN global decisions was the only way to reach agreement on certain issues. This, combined with the fact that the secretariat was not inclined to develop specific development paradigms for the region, encouraged ECWA and then ESCWA, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, to seek a role in the dissemination and adaptation of UN economic and social principles, values, and policies to the region.

This brief introduction to the contributions of each commission brings out both similarities and differences. The culture of each commission — consisting of ideas, value judgments, and institutional mechanisms — was shaped by the circumstances of the region, the leadership of their executive secretaries, and by the dominant ideas of the time. The culture specific to each commission may be the most distinctive contribution that they have made to the intellectual history of the UN. Each culture has nurtured ideas that highlighted the double dimension of each commissions contribution. First, they developed responses to the specific needs of their region, which sometimes proved to be globally applicable; second, they adapted to the conditions of the region ideas developed by the UN at the global level.

Depending on the circumstances of the region or of the problem being addressed, the ideas could be more or less original, more or less sophisticated. For example, in analyzing the external trade of Latin American countries with their developed partners, ECLA noted asymmetrical benefits and developed the center-periphery thesis on which it based a development strategy, including industrialization by import substitution, which later inspired several countries of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The ECE, confronted with the division of Europe between two antagonistic blocs that were opposed by their ideologies and their views on how to organize the economy, took a functionalist and pragmatic approach to developing East-West cooperation on well-defined technical matters of common interest. Several of the norms and conventions which resulted from this approach became global or were extended to neighboring countries of the ECE region.

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Excerpted from Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas by Yves Berthelot. Copyright © 2004 United Nations Intellectual History Project. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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