What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it, by Thomas G Weiss, Polity, £14.99
All bureaucracies are challenged by issues that cross organisational boundaries. Professor John Stewart coined the term "wicked issues"; for the UN, these are "problems without passports".
Born out of the ruins of the second world war, the UN is an heroic attempt to get to grips with those problems that individual member states cannot deal with alone: nuclear proliferation, genocide, climate change, international terrorism, global poverty and pandemics. But with what success? As with all bureaucracies, the UN has grown. A membership of 51 states at the signing of the UN Charter in June 1945 stands at 192 today. This is scarcely conducive to swift and purposeful decision making, especially when member states cling stubbornly to their own sovereignty, or form inflexible coalitions of North versus South.
What's more, from its core functions of international peace and security, human rights and sustainable development have grown a plethora of programmes, funds, agencies and secretariats that protect their organisational boundaries as fiercely as member states protect their national ones. For all this, the author maintains a stoical optimism, stopping narrowly short of the theosophical, that humankind can organise itself rationally to solve global problems.
Does he persuade us to share his optimism? Not convincingly. How often do government departments or local authorities in this country battle with each other at the expense of the wider good?
But failure to address global challenges from a collective perspective puts at risk our very survival as a species. If the UN did not exist we would have to invent it. It will pay us all to help repair it.
Richard Shaw is chief executive of Surrey county council and heads the Local Government Alliance for International Development
