DEVELOPMENT: Officials Deny Turf War Between UN and World Bank

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 7 1999 (IPS) - After years of sporadic rivalry and rumours of turf battles, officials at the United Nations and World Bank say their two organisations are working better together.

One senior Bank official – Vice President Ismail Serageldin of Egypt – said any perceived World Bank dominance of the United Nations was a “myth” and added, “This is pure bureaucratic talk by people who are locked up in their little offices.”

Contrary to rumours, Serageldin told IPS, “there is no turf war between the United Nations and the World Bank.”

“There is no reason for the United Nations to be scared of the Bank,” he said. “It should really be scared only if the World Bank is supporting a different agenda from that of the United Nations.”

UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette said that, although the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) held different views from the United Nations on development at the beginning of the decade, “we are all believers in comprehensive development now.”

Earlier, she noted, the IMF and the World Bank focused on “getting the fundamentals right” and the role of the market, while the United Nations called for “adjustment with a human face” and emphasised the importance of the state.

Now, she said, there is much more convergence on ideas. “The argument you hear in the UN General Assembly and in the boards of the World Bank and the IMF are now often so much alike that, if you closed your eyes, you could not always be sure whether you were in New York or Washington,” she argued recently.

Yet reports of rivalry persist. On several occasions, UN member states and some UN officials have privately complained that a resource-rich World Bank is increasingly taking over the traditional economic and social functions of the United Nations.

These include human development, poverty alleviation, education and health care – all of which were once considered primarily “UN territory.”

But Serageldin, who is a front runner for the post of director- general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) – from which incumbent Federico Mayor is stepping down in December – noted that the World Bank has long shared common goals with the UN system.

One longtime World Bank focus, he pointed out, was the goal of “education for all.” The Bank is spending some 900 million dollars a year on primary education alone, he said – a contribution which he added should be “wonderful” from UNESCO’s point of view, given that the UN agency’s total 1998-99 budget is only about 554 million dollars.

“Would it have been better for the World Bank not to finance primary education?” he asked.

Serageldin said that since James Wolfensohn took over as president in 1995, the World Bank has “realigned its position to suit the global agenda.”

UNDP Associate Administrator Zephirin Diabre agreed that since Wolfensohn arrived, there has been an evolution at the World Bank. “The Bank is now more concerned with the human side of development,” he said, and it “has also been responding to criticisms against its approach to development issues”.

At the same time, he said, some of the world’s main donor nations believe that the Bank is more efficient than the UN system. As a result, members have continued to replenish the Bank with billions of dollars in funds while resources allocated to UN agencies have been shrinking.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP), the largest UN body to provide development assistance, gives more than one billion dollars to poorer nations annually.

By contrast, the World Bank, in 1997 alone, provided 14.5 billion dollars, primarily to fund power, oil and gas, water and sanitation, industry and mining and urban development. Since its creation in July 1944, the Bank has disbursed more than 300 billion dollars in concessional loans to developing nations.

Yet the United Nations has several advantages over the Bank, Diabre argued. “The United Nations has strong partnerships with governments, has a universal presence and also has capacity- building at the country level – all of which the World Bank lacks,” he said.

But what was important, Diabre said, was complementarity. “In the final analysis, it is the country that should gain,” he contended.

To that end, Bank and UN officials have boosted efforts in recent years to work together.

One of the Bank’s key goals, Serageldin said, is to ensure implementation of the various action plans adopted at nine major UN conferences since 1990. These include agreements on the environment, population, poverty alleviation, the advancement of women and human settlements.

Serageldin said the World Bank, far from battling the United Nations, is collaborating with UN agencies on issues ranging from sustainable development and agricultural research to microcredit and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

“All of us should be involved in resolving these global issues – bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally,” he added.

UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown – who took office last week after serving as World Bank vice president for external affairs – said there must be a new spirit of partnership between UNDP and the Bank.

“At the policy and strategic level, UNDP and the World Bank have recently identified broad common goals and complementary approaches,” he said last week.

“We already collaborate extensively in Latin America, which is a good model, because it shows what we can do through a tripartite relationship with the Bank and governments,” he added.