The UN and Development: From Aid to Cooperation. Bertil Odén reviews the book of that title by Olav Stokke.
UN Ideas that Changed the World
The useful review by Shaw of UN Ideas that Changed the World (by Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij and Thomas G. Weiss. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009) also contains useful background on the United Nations Intellectual History Project.
DJ Shaw is a former economic adviser and chief, Policy Affairs Service, UN World Food Programme and consultant to FAO, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat.
Plan for partial rather than total success?
Richard Jolly was Special Advisor to the Administrator of UNDP between1995 and 2002, principal architect of the annual Human Development Report and a champion for the 20/20 initiative. Jo Bealls writes about him in Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (edited by Simon, 2005):
“In the first co-authored volume of [a 12-volume history of the UN’s] economic and social contribution, Ahead of the Curve (Emmerij et al., 2001) Jolly is dismissive of concerns about the origin and ownership of ideas, emphasising instead their impact and spread and he is firm that the UN has played an important role in this regard. In a paper written in preparation for the Human Development Report 2003 (Jolly, 2003) he appealed for a more nuanced and flexible interpretation of success in terms of achieving UN goals. Too often, he argued, UN development projects are considered ‘failures’ because global goals are only partially or regionally met, when in fact huge progress has been achieved. If setting global goals is to be valuable and successful, he contended, ‘it is important now to plan for partial success and partial failure, not for the extremes of either total success or total failure’ , especially in the cases of the least developed countries.”
Has there been wider agreement of Jolly’s view that the UN should plan for partial rather than total success or failure? If so, to what extent has this been implemented and with what results?
References:
EMMERIJ, L., JOLLY, R. & WEISS, T. G. 2001. Ahead of the curve?: UN ideas and global challenges, Indiana Univ Pr.
JOLLY, R. 2003. Global Goals–the UN experience. Background paper for the Human Development Report, 85–110.
SIMON, D. 2005. Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, Taylor & Francis.
NYU DRI
Development Research Institute at New York University
Failing to Deliver as One?
Delivering as One
MyiLibrary
MyiLibrary (get to it via Athens) provides access to collections of books, reports, journals, bulletins and other documents published by inter-governmental organisations such as the World Bank, United Nations and International Labour Organisation. The full text for many of them is available online.
UNIHP
The United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP)
SciVerse
Rethinking Project Management
Rethinking Project Management was a research network of academics and practitioners seeking to identify new directions for how the discipline might be extended and enriched for the 21st century. Their trigger was concern about conventional project management theory and how it relates to the growing practice of managing projects across different industry sectors.The final report was published in 2006.
“The main proposition behind the network is this: as the world of project management practice continues to develop across different industries and sectors, the subject of project management is now attracting major criticisms, and the gap between conventional project management theory and the developing practice is widening. There are also increasing calls for the identification of new research perspectives and new research topics from other related disciplines. It was against this background that UMIST and UCL submitted a research proposal to the EPSRC proposing a new network to help rethink this emerging discipline. The principal argument of the research proposal was not that conventional project management theory should now be abandoned, but rather there is a need to extend, enrich, reshape and develop this field beyond its current intellectual foundations.”