A comprehensive approach but quickly dated

"The United Nations and Business : A Partnership Recovered" by Sandrine Tesner with the collaboration of Georg Kell Published : August, 2000 by St. Martin's Press, New York Length : 240 pages

Sandrine Tesner has written an engaging and detailed piece of research investigating the relationship between the UN and the private sector with this book. After starting with the somewhat troubled history of that relationship prior to Kofi Annan’s outreach to the private sector in 1997, Tesner seeks to explain why the newly strengthened relationship should be so important, what the obstacles to its efficiency are and how it can best be taken forward.

The book is quite neatly subdivided into five main chapters with several further subdivisions within those. The first chapter is a detailed account of the UN’s relationship with the private sector since 1945, at first a close relationship, then a distant and troubled one from the start of decolonisation until the adoption of more economically liberal policies in the 1980s and then increasingly close since the demise of Communism and ideological stumbling blocks. The following chapter goes into the theoretical side of the strategic benefits for both the UN and business of increasing their joint operations. The third chapter then goes into the details of areas for cooperation and operational aspects of making these reality. This is then illustrated by examples of already existing partnerships from the various operational areas mentioned. The fourth chapter considers the policy implications and changes required within the UN to make the process work while the conclusion finally ends up by claiming the necessity of something approaching a new world order in which the UN can operate effectively with governments, the private sector and civil society with much increased participation and even representation by the latter two.

As such, this is an admirable work. Tesner’s numerous examples of how partnerships between the UN and the private sector have led to benefits on both sides provides a convincing theoretical framework to explain the crucial role of public-private partnerships in handling the negative externalities of globalization. As Tesner puts it in her introduction, "In the creation of a normative framework to accompany globalization, the private sector is the necessary and privileged partner of the United Nations" (p. xxiii).

However it is here that the limitations of her work start to show slightly. The main problem is that the theoretical side of her research is not quite matched by the practical side. She argues well for the fact that globalization has created unprecedented opportunities for prosperity but is missing vital social components to catch the economic losers in the process. Since there is no incentive for the private sector alone to provide these components and the public sector is handicapped by a lack of resources and regulatory capabilities, the main solution seems to lie in partnership, according to her research. In fact, in her conclusion, she goes so far as to claim that corporations will need vastly increased representation at the UN in order to create the most radical world order since that set in motion by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, in order to deal with the challenges of globalization. This may well be a rather debatable position but the form she envisions for this new order, one of collaborative networks formed of the UN, governments, corporate actors and civil society, is taken closely from UN thinking in the field of the Global Compact initiative and has much to commend it.

At the same time, the practical examples Tesner cites seem to fall very short of the theoretical vision she espouses. While her theory stresses incorporating member states and NGOs (though rather more so the former than the latter), her examples either relegate governments and civil society to the background or ignore them altogether. This may of course be excused on the grounds that her examples come from a time before the new ideas of networking among multiple sectors were taken seriously. However her prescriptions for the way forward, where these try to be practical, seem essentially to be extensions of the policies that guided these earlier partnerships. She advocates including governments but gives little advice on how to incorporate them into a future governance structure. Hence it is difficult not to feel a certain emptiness in her rhetoric where this stresses making nation states continuous stakeholders in future networks.

Thus Tesner’s work becomes a grand exposition on the topic of UN-business partnerships in the late 1990s but if even her own theory is correct, her practical suggestions will soon be outdated. Essentially, her theory argues for dealing with underlying structural problems of a socio-economic nature in the coming years while her practical frameworks would allow little other than manifestations of those problems to be tackled by her proposed partnerships. This is not then so much a criticism of Tesner’s work, which sets out the problem very well, but rather a reflection of the challenge to the UN system as a whole. The fact that Tesner’s solutions may not seem entirely adequate represents the lack of a clearly defined approach within the UN rather than within her own thinking. This is something only now being addressed (not least by the Staff College’s own Partnership for Global Policy Networks programme) but Tesner represents the problem well with lines such as, "the UN was not apt to devise pro-market policies as it emerged from two decades of a Marxist-inclined, structuralist economic discourse" (p. 145). The limitations of Tesner’s proposed practical framework essentially reflect the inadequacy of the UN’s own practical strategies for incorporating non-state actors at the field level at the time of writing (late 1999, early 2000).

This may of course be partly a reflection of Tesner’s own background in the UN system. A staff member of the UN Office of Project Services (UNOPS), her own experiences show through with a rather heavy reliance on UNOPS and UNDP to illustrate many of her points. This also makes it rather difficult to view with complete trust the sporadic and largely uncritical claims to great success by UNOPS while the rest of the UN system is treated in a rather more balanced manner. The ideas that UNOPS is one of the great pioneers of UN collaboration with the private sector and one of the most efficiently run organizations in the UN system (apparently a consequence of its own business rather than political orientation, according to Tesner) become rather hard to take totally seriously if the reader is aware of events outside the book. For example, UNOPS was created in 1995, by which time, many agencies, noticeably UNICEF and WHO for example, had done enough work not to have to rely on UNOPS as a great pioneer of collaboration with the private sector. Tesner claims that, "The growth and future status of UNOPS within the UN system will provide a key test of the UN’s commitment to a rapprochement between the UN and the private sector in the name of UN reform, efficiency, and cost savings" (p. 31). The supposed efficiency of UNOPS as a "key test" is a shade hard to take seriously after the heavy criticism by UNDP’s Executive Board in 2000 of its $6m (approximately some 78% of the budgeted cost) cost overrun incurred during the move of its office in Manhattan.

One final criticism would be in the area of Tesner’s referencing. While the endnotes are extensive and well explained, the quality of the references is somewhat variable as regards the accuracy of designating sources. While this may not be a bother to the merely interested reader who is unlikely to want to go to those references anyway, it could cause frustration to the reader who is using the book for further research of their own.

The above criticisms should not, however, deter anyone from reading the book who is unfamiliar with the topic of the UN’s outreach to the private sector since 1997 or who is interested in learning more about possible responses by the UN to the challenges of globalization. Tesner’s analysis of the problems is excellent and her theoretical framework is a superb analysis with many insights. If anything, the only problem with the book may be simply that on the practical side, it fails to live up consistently to its own ambitions. However even Tesner herself seems aware to a degree of these limitations as she states in her own conclusion, "The aim of this book, however, is not to engage in political fiction but rather to impart to the world community a sense of urgency regarding the inadequacy of current policies and institutional settings to the conditions of the global era" (p. 161). While the rapid pace of change in the field may render the book’s practical strategies obsolete quite quickly, it still provides a concise analysis of the challenge to which the UN system has to respond.