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"United Nations Development Programme History."
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The UN and development : from aid to cooperation
The UN and Development provides the first comprehensive overview of the
development policies and activities of the United Nations system from the late 1940s
to the present. With an explicit focus on the history of the ideas that have been
generated, institutionalized, and implemented by UN organizations, this book
examines changing trends in development paradigms from the concept of technical
assistance to underdeveloped countries, as they were called in the late 1940s, to
development cooperation in the 21st century. Olav Stokke traces this fascinating
story and demonstrates the UN's essential role and its future challenges in aiding
the least developed countries and the globe's billion poorest inhabitants.
eBook
UN peacekeeping in Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo : operational and legal issues in practice
This book examines a number of issues associated with contemporary multinational peace operations, and seeks to provide insights into the problems that arise in establishing and deploying such forces to meet the challenges of current conflicts.
Book
The United Nations Development Programme and System
This volume provides a short and accessible introduction to the organization that serves as the primary coordinator of the work of the UN system throughout the developing world -the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The book:
traces the origins and evolution of UNDP, outlining how a central UN funding mechanism and field network developed into a more comprehensive development agency
evaluates the UNDP's performance and results, both in its role as system coordinator and as a development organization in its own right
considers the return of the UNDP to a more central role within the UN development system, in order to review the successive attempts at UN development system reform, the reasons for failure and the future possibilities for a more effective system with the UNDP at the centre.
Offering a clear, comprehensive overview and analysis of the organization, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of development studies, international organizations and international relations.
eBook
When \Humanitarianism\ Becomes \Development\: The Politics of International Aid in Syria's Palestinian Refugee Camps
In recent years, the united Nations Relief and works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has attempted to go beyond its role as a provider of relief and basic services in Palestinian refugee camps and emphasize its role as a development agency, in this article, I focus on the Neirab Rehabilitation Project an UNRWA-sponsored development project taking place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Ein el Tal and Neirab in northern Syria. I argue that UNRWA's role as a relief-centered humanitarian organization highlights the everyday suffering of Palestinian refugees, suffering that has become embedded in refugees' political claims. I show that UNRWA's emphasis on \"development\" in the refugee camps is forcing Palestinian refugees in Ein el Tal and Neirab to reassess the political narrative through which they have understood their relationship with UNRWA. Depuis quelques années, l'UNRWA, (Office de secours et de travaux des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés de Palestine dans le Proche-Orient) s'efforce d'aller au delà de son rôle de fournisseur d'aide et services de première nécessité dans les camps de réfugiés palestiniens et de mettre l'accent sur son rôle en tant qu'agence de développement. A travers l'étude du Projet de Rehabilitation de Neirab (« Neirab Rehabilitation Project »), pour lequel l'UNRWA intervient dans deux camps du Nord de la Syrie (Ein el Tal et Neirab), cet article vise à montrer ce processus de transformation. Alors que le rôle de l'UNRWA en tant qu'organisation humanitaire dédiée au secours met en lumière la souffrance quotidienne des réfugiés palestiniens, une souffrance qui a été pleinement intégrée dans leurs revendications politiques, l'accent mis récemment sur le «développement» dans les camps force les réfugiés de Ein el Tal et Neirab à reconsidérer le discours politique à travers lequel ils avaient défini leur relation avec l'UNRWA.
Journal Article
Food Security Politics and the Millennium Development Goals
This article reviews proposals regarding the recent food crisis in the context of a broader, threshold debate on the future of agriculture and food security. While the MDGs have focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the food crisis pushed the hungry over the one billion mark. There is thus a renewed focus on agricultural development, which pivots on the salience of industrial agriculture (as a supply source) in addressing food security. The World Bank's new 'agriculture for development' initiative seeks to improve small-farmer productivity with new inputs, and their incorporation into global markets via value-chains originating in industrial agriculture. An alternative claim, originating in 'food sovereignty' politics, demanding small-farmer rights to develop bio-regionally specific agro-ecological methods and provision for local, rather than global, markets, resonates in the IAASTD report, which implies agribusiness as usual ''is no longer an option'. The basic divide is over whether agriculture is a servant of economic growth, or should be developed as a foundational source of social and ecological sustainability. We review and compare these different paradigmatic approaches to food security, and their political and ecological implications.
Journal Article
The emergence of global attention to health systems strengthening
After a period of proliferation of disease-specific initiatives, over the past decade and especially since 2005 many organizations involved in global health have come to direct attention and resources to the issue of health systems strengthening. We explore how and why such attention emerged. A qualitative methodology, process-tracing, was used to construct a case history and analyse the factors shaping and inhibiting global political attention for health systems strengthening. We find that the critical factors behind the recent burst of attention include fears among global health actors that health systems problems threaten the achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals, concern about the adverse effects of global health initiatives on national health systems, and the realization among global health initiatives that weak health systems present bottlenecks to the achievement of their organizational objectives. While a variety of actors now embrace health systems strengthening, they do not constitute a cohesive policy community. Moreover, the concept of health systems strengthening remains vague and there is a weak evidence base for informing policies and programmes for strengthening health systems. There are several reasons to question the sustainability of the agenda. Among these are the global financial crisis, the history of pendulum swings in global health and the instrumental embrace of the issue by some actors.
Journal Article
On norms and agency
This report provides tremendous insight on gender norms an area that has been resistant to change, and that constrains achievement of gender equality across many diverse cultures. The report synthesizes data collected from more than 4,000 women and men in 97 communities across 20 countries. It is the largest dataset ever collected on the topic of gender and development, providing an unprecedented opportunity to examine potential patterns across communities on social norms and gender roles, pathways of empowerment, and factors that drive acute inequalities. The analysis raises the profile of persistent social norms and their impact on agency, and catalyzes discourse on the many pathways that create opportunities for women and men to negotiate transformative change. The report is underpinned by the fact that arguably the single most important contribution to development is to unleash the full power of half the people on the planet women. It underscores how crucial making investments in learning, supporting innovations that reduce the time costs of women s mobility, and developing a critical mass of women and men pushing the boundaries of entrenched social norms are in enhancing women s agency and capacity to aspire.
eBook
The ruble lever: Soviet development knowledge and the political economy of the UN
From the early 1950s, the USSR was the second largest contributor to the UN. Following UN rules, it gave much of its contribution in rubles, an infamously unconvertible currency that generally limited Soviet actions overseas. In the hands of UN officials, however, these ‘weak’ rubles became a powerful lever that made UN development projects more Soviet. Seeking to extract value from the ruble, officials increased the amount of UN development training held in the USSR, prioritized the purchase of Soviet equipment, and incentivized agencies to distribute Soviet manuals. Exploring the ruble lever contributes to our knowledge of the Soviet presence at the UN while foregrounding political economy as a key mechanism shaping UN practices more widely. Following the money in forms other than the dollar can reveal how economies of power at the UN intersect with global economic history, as well as the conceptual and contemporary challenges of international cooperation among wildly unequal economies.
Journal Article
Managing the world: the United Nations, decolonization, and the strange triumph of state sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s
This article examines a 1956 United Nations effort to respond to decolonization, by supplying newly independent governments with international administrators to help build sovereign nation-states out of the disintegrating European empires and anchor them firmly within the capitalist world. The article reveals the UN as a significant historical actor during the Cold War beyond the organization’s function of providing a forum for intergovernmental debates and lobbying. While the initiative never resulted in a large-scale response to decolonization, it ultimately effected a substantial shift in the practice of development assistance: from advisory services to a more paternalist approach that focused on ‘getting the work done’ on behalf of aid recipients. Recovering this history helps account for the strange triumph of state sovereignty in the second half of the twentieth century: its global proliferation at a time when international actors became increasingly active in the management of the public affairs of developing countries.
Journal Article