FULL EMPLOYMENT, BASIC SOCIAL SERVICES, AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPMENT ARE MEANS FOR PEOPLE TO ENJOY FULFILLING LIVES, ILO OFFICIAL STATES
Press Release
ECOSOC/5755
FULL EMPLOYMENT, BASIC SOCIAL SERVICES, AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPMENT ARE MEANS FOR PEOPLE TO ENJOY FULFILLING LIVES, ILO OFFICIAL STATES
19980514 Economic and Social Council Holds Panel Discussion On Work of Task Forces of Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC)Full employment, basic social services for all, and an enabling environment for economic and social development, more than just themes addressed by the task forces of the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC), were actually the means for people to enjoy fulfilling lives, the Economic and Social Council was told this morning as it continued its session on the integrated and coordinated follow-up of major United Nations conferences and summits.
The Council held a panel discussion with representatives of the organizations that chaired the ACC inter-agency task forces and chairpersons of ACC committees on follow-up by United Nations and specialized agencies.
The Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Katherine Hagen, of the Task Force on Full Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods, said an international consensus must be achieved on the importance of full employment and on the means to achieve it as part of the strategy of the Council and other organs for a coordinated follow-up to major international conferences.
World Bank Vice-President Mark Malloch-Brown, of the Task Force on an Enabling Environment for Economic and Social Development, said countries must be allowed development choices, and they should not have measures forced upon them. Governments should seize ownership of their development process. He also emphasized that good governance was a central issue that preoccupied every agency and programme in the United Nations system. Without responsible, transparent government, sustained development would be difficult to achieve.
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The United Nations system had demonstrated at the country level that it could translate the goals of the major conferences into viable programmes, said the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Nafis Sadik, of the Task Force on Basic Social Services for All. That task force had distributed a report on its results which included guidelines on education, child and maternal mortality, access to health care, and women's empowerment, among other topics. Those had also been distributed to the resident coordinators in each country and to members of the development community.
The Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, Assistant Secretary-General Angela King, also the Chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Women and Gender Equality, said the Committee's approach had been guided by the need to achieve visible outputs. Its role included ensuring that the United Nations was at the cutting-edge in realizing equality between women and men. Gender mainstreaming was an integral part of all conferences and should be a key part of their follow-up. There should be greater and strong links between Headquarters and the field, including at the regional level.
Other presentations were made by: Mary Chinery-Hesse, Deputy Director- General of the ILO and Chairperson of the Consultative Committee on Programme and Operational Questions; and Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Chairman of the Inter-Agency Committee on Sustainable Development. The panellists were introduced by the Council President, Juan Somavia (Chile).
The Council will meet again at 3 p.m. today to hold a panel discussion with the presidents of Executive Boards and heads of funds and programmes on the theme "coordinated follow-up by funds and programmes and the Council's guidance to the executive boards".
Council Work Programme
The Economic and Social Council met this morning to continue its session on the integrated and coordinated follow-up of major United Nations conferences and summits. It was scheduled to hold a panel discussion with organizations that chaired the inter-agency tasks forces of the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC) and the chairpersons of ACC Committees on implementation and follow-up by the United Nations and specialized agencies.
Panel Discussion
JUAN SOMAVIA (Chile), President of the Economic and Social Council, introduced the first group of panellists: Mark Malloch-Brown, Task force on an Enabling Environment for Economic and Social Development; Dr. Nafis Sadik, Task force on Basic Social Services for All; and Katherine Hagen, Task force on Full Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods.
MARK MALLOCH-BROWN, a Vice-President of the World Bank, spoke on the Task Force on an Enabling Environment for Economic and Social Development. He said that among the conclusions of the task force was that there was a growing convergence between United Nations agencies and the task force on the development agenda. He said it was vital that the remaining points of emphasis and disagreement took place in an overall broad context of agreement and consensus, as countries must be allowed choices, they should seize ownership of their development process and should not be dictated to. Another conclusion emphasized that good governance was a central issues that preoccupied every agency and programme of the United Nations system. It was also critical to move towards a common set of data, measures of output and effectiveness. Regarding the costs of coordination, he said the overarching priority was better coordination at the country-level.
Addressing the themes of poverty reduction, human rights, gender equity and civil society, he said the World Bank had contributed to the ACC's statement on poverty eradication, which reflected the view that the whole United Nations system must speak with one voice and move in one direction. The World Bank was also much more willing to address issues of human rights than in the past. Without responsible transparent government, sustained development would be difficult to achieve. Gender equity was not just an issue of following instructions from Governments, it was a powerful lever for effective development at the country level. In addition, all agencies must embrace all developments partners in a country, including civil society.
Recently, there had been a high level of cooperation between the United Nations system and the Bretton Woods institutions, he said, adding that on May 27 and 28, the World Bank would hold a meeting with members of the Council.
Dr. NAFIS SADIK, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), spoke on the Task force on Basic Social Services for All. She said that the United Nations system had demonstrated at the country level that it could translate the goals of the major conferences into viable programmes. Her task force had distributed a report on
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its end products throughout the United Nations system. That report included guidelines on education, child and maternal mortality, access to health care, and women's empowerment among other topics. It had also produced a compendium of all the social issues that emerged from the global conferences in the 1990s. That compendium used the social goals that were set in the conferences and identified what each conference said on particular issues. Also, the task force had produced a pocket advocacy card on why it was important to invest in basic social services. Those materials were designed to promote integrated conference implementation and to keep alive policy dialogue at the country level.
In order to utilize the work of the task force, she said the results of its work were distributed to the resident coordinators in each country as well as to all those in the development community. At the country level, the United Nations coordinator should make those materials available to the business sector, government and political leaders and other actors. The work generated by all the ACC task forces should be utilized in the United Nations follow-up work.
She added that the United Nations system needed to find a more integrated and coherent way to work with partners in the various commissions. On the work of the UNFPA, she said its Executive Board had recently categorized countries into three groups based on how they measured up to the core indicators for development. UNFPA had made efforts to focus its financial resources on the countries that were most in need. There were also resources provided to countries that were in transition.
KATHERINE HAGEN, Deputy Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), spoke on the Task Force on Full Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods. She said the task force's primary focus was a number of comprehensive country-level reviews, based on a framework featuring concerns about both the level and quality of employment. They showed that a review exercise at the country level could provide shape to the goals of enhancing the level and quality of employment for some countries. They also proved to be a useful instrument for consensus-building and for identifying where further assistance might be sought from the United Nations system. In the countries where the review exercises were conducted, there had been a variety of follow-up initiatives. Those were important because the value of a comprehensive exercise should be in its usefulness to subsequent action. Inter-agency coordination, among those agencies which were involved in employment-related activities, had also occurred in constructive ways.
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Regarding follow-up activities through the ACC, she said the outcome of the task force was incorporated into the overall review of the ACC task force experience in October 1997. It was important to encourage a flexible network approach, led by task managers and using information technology, to provide policy advice and programme assistance in the follow-up to conferences at the country level, with an emphasis on specific issues and among relevant agencies which would not necessarily be the same in every case.
In some cases, inter-agency coordination appropriately covered all agencies, funds and programmes of the ACC, she said. The Inter-Agency Committee on Women and Gender Equality had been established as a standing committee of the ACC and with a mandate that was clearly not and should not be a time-bound exercise. While in other cases, the exercise might be more focused, but still required more time than the intense and concentrated effort at coordination, which was a feature of the three task forces.
She went on to say that full employment and sustainable livelihoods, basic social services for all, and an enabling environment were more than cross-cutting themes. They were the means, the opportunities, the translation of dreams into realities for people to live fulfilling lives together in communities and in a global setting of peace and social harmony. A global consensus must be achieved on the importance of full employment and on the means to achieve it as part of the strategy for the Council and other organs for a coordinated follow-up to major international conferences.
Responding to questions about the convergence of views between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations, Mr. MALLOCH-BROWN said the World Bank had decided it was not preferable to achieve a total agreement that lowered the common denominator. It was better to look for common goals and directions and allow for disagreements on tactical measures. There was agreement and good will between the Bretton Woods institutions and the Organization, which was reflected in the work of the Task Force on an Enabling Environment for Economic and Social Development. While genuine difference remained concerning methods in the areas of debt relief and social services, they were valid differences among friends.
A move towards country-level coordination between the Bretton Woods institutions and United Nations agencies behind closed doors would be a failure, he said. It was important to ensure that coordination mechanisms were inclusive of all donors and driven by governments. The national government must be in charge of the process. Countries where the government had taken control of the development process had been largely successful. Instances where development programmes were imposed on a country were less effective.
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Regarding follow-up to the three task forces, he said the task force considered its work finished when it reported its findings. An enabling environment could only work as a mainstreamed activity of the whole system; it was bigger than the task force. The task force provided a launching pad, and the system and its constituent parts, including the Council, needed to take over.
Responding to questions on the use of task force guidelines and recommendations, Dr. SADIK said that many resident coordinators knew of the guidelines but some did not use them. That was due, in part, to a lack of knowledge on how to put the guidelines into practice. Her task force was designing training courses for resident coordinators and others on implementing guidelines and recommendations at the field level.
Responding to questions involving countries in the creation of guidelines and indicators, she said her task force had included countries in creating guidelines in the area of health, but that practice had not been done universally and more work was needed in that area.
On a question regarding results of the implementation of conference follow-up, she said an ad hoc group within her task force was going to be convened to look into the issue. It was also producing data on follow up to the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. In an effort to coordinate work with various commissions, her task force had reported its results to the Commission on Population and Development and to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Responding to questions about coordination between the ACC, the Council and the task forces, Ms. HAGEN said the ACC was looking for better ways to operate as a member of the United Nations system and to coordinate its work more effectively. The task force initiative had triggered renewed interest in how the ACC operated and how it could connect with the Council. Yet, there were diverse interests that operated within the ACC, and it was not as well- organized as one might think. It was important to explore how the Council might interact better with the specialized agencies and other entities that were part of the ACC. There was a separateness of specialized agencies that had not been fully worked out.
Regarding the work of the ILO and the task force, she said it had discovered that very few agencies had expertise in the field of employment. The task force showed the agencies that employment must be addressed, but it was clear that the lead must be taken by the ILO. The work of the task force was country-focused, and much of its efforts were put into the country reviews in engaging the participants, including the government and the social partners. The work of the task force was disconnected from the way the Council had addressed the other issues.
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Also taking part in the exchange of views, NITIN DESAI, Under-Secretary- General for Economic and Social Affairs, said the interaction between the Council and the ACC should be discussed tomorrow when the Council ends the current session. On the creation and coordination of core indicators, he said the Statistical Commission and other bodies working with statistics were attempting to coordinate their efforts, not to create a single set of indicators, but to ensure consistency. The United Nations did not want to impose one set of indicators to all countries. There was a need to hear from Member States on how to create statistical consistency.
Mr. SOMAVIA (Chile), the Council President, then introduced the second group of panellists: Angela King, Assistant Secretary-General, Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, and Chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Women and Gender Equality; Mary Chinery-Hesse, Chairperson of the Consultative Committee on Programme and Operational Questions; and Nitin Desai, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Chairman of the Inter-Agency Committee on Sustainable Development.
ANGELA KING, Chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Women and Gender Equality, said the Committee's approach had been guided by the need to achieve visible outputs. Its role as an ACC standing committee went beyond well-defined specific tasks. It needed to ensure that the United Nations was at the cutting-edge in realizing equality between women and men.
Gender mainstreaming was an integral part of all conferences and should be a key part of their follow-up, she said. The Beijing Platform for Action addressed many issues that were discussed at other conferences, so attention to the Beijing Platform was a means of making follow-up more integrated. It also promoted a systematic attention to gender in other ACC machinery, including at the field level. In that context, it was important to emphasize the valuable work of the tasks forces to the Committee's work.
Among the challenges that remained, she said United Nations field staff needed to understand the links between conferences and gender implications. The Resident Coordinators must be supported so they could carry out their work with competence and accountability. Field level staff must be able to apply a gender perspective to their work. An upcoming workshop for Resident Coordinators would discuss methods to strengthen the field level capacity to mainstream a gender perspective.
The Secretary-General's support of gender equality underscored the central importance of women and gender to the work of the Organization and the reform process, she said. One ACC statement on gender equality represented a declaration of commitment at the highest level of the United Nations system to be accountable for outcomes. Yet, there should be greater and strong links between Headquarters and the field, including at the regional level. That was an important coordination issue. The Committee also stressed that
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quantitative and qualitative data were needed to evaluate benchmarks. Four other levels of attention also needed to be addressed: the translation of conference directives into practical guidelines; interactions between the Committee and other bodies; clear and ongoing communication to agency heads; and making gender awareness and responsiveness a routine element in the Secretary-General's executive committees and cabinet.
MARY CHINERY-HESSE, Chairperson of the Consultative Committee on Programme and Operational Questions, said her Committee was attempting to create a common approach at the country level in implementing conference goals. There was a lot of gray areas in that process, however, and efforts should be made to ensure that bodies did not duplicate work. The Committee was well placed to take programmatic issues and apply them at the country level.
Coordinating activities at the country level was challenging however, because there were many qualified people with their own ideas for development, she said. One way to improve work at the national level was to make sure the task force guidelines were practical and could work in the field. The Consultative Committee had collected the results from applying task force work in various countries. There were examples from the Philippines, Morocco, Thailand and others on how guidelines had been used in the field.
She added that more work needed to be accomplished in identifying cross-cutting themes. There was also a need to examine best practices and disseminate those to other countries. One of the problems in moving the recommendations of the conferences forward was that some government actors did not give sufficient attention to those recommendations. Measures should be taken to encourage policy makers and government leaders to keep the issues from the conferences on the front burner.
Mr. DESAI, Chairman of the Inter-Agency Committee on Sustainable Development, said its experience was unique because it was tied to one conference and its mandate was to implement the outcome of that conference. It was not possible to separate the follow up to Agenda 21 from the work of the United Nations system. Agenda 21 included a substantial amount of work that concerned further policy development at the global level. The Committee's task manager approach attempted to determine if the normal work processes of the various organizations could be useful in the follow-up of Agenda 21. The Committee was somewhat like its counterpart of the ACC on sustainable development, but it sought to fold in its responsibilities with the work of agencies, servicing the whole system and having direct contact with task managers.
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Regarding the weak points of the Committee's process, he said the mechanism required from agencies, in particular, a degree of commitment of resources, which the Committee did not provide to them. Instead, those resources had to be obtained from their own governing bodies. It was important to recognize that as a problem area that needed to be addressed. Because the Committee did not have a direct link with a funding mechanism, it had not been as effective in influencing what happened at the country level. The Committee needed to determine if lessons learned could be implemented through the task manager mechanism in order to provide the level of practical guidance that was necessary in the work in of sustainable development.
The Committee also experienced a weakness at the regional level, which was common for inter-agency task forces, he said. The intergovernmental processes that guided its work had not fully integrated the regional dimension into their own work process. All of that work called for additional resources for implementation at the country level. Unless those resources were forthcoming, the mechanisms would increasingly lose credibility in the eyes of the people they were supposed to help. The future of the process that addressed the follow up to conferences not only lay with coordination and policy guidance, but also with the mechanism for financing actions arising from conferences.
Responding to a question on coordination between different United Nations bodies, Ms. KING said that many agencies where aware of each other's work on gender. Best practices were disseminated among them and there was follow-up on the recommendations of the task forces. On a question regarding interaction between the heads of United Nations bodies, she said there was an ongoing exchange of information among them and that information was used regularly in work of the Committee. In an effort to coordinate work on gender issues, the last report of the Committee contained an inventory of the gender issues discussed as well as how the various agencies and bodies were handling those issues.
Responding to a question on setting up networks of bodies within and outside the United Nations, Ms. CHINERY-HESSE said the Consultative Committee had been advocating the network approach to the follow-up to the World Food Summit. Networking allowed like-minded institutions covering different issues to get together and that approach could be effective. On coordination between the Consultative Committee and the Council, many actions taken within the Committee were triggered by the Council's agreed conclusions. The Consultative Committee was also attempting to coordinate efforts with civil society by including private businesses and non-governmental organizations in its discussions.
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Regarding a question on follow-up, Mr. DESAI said the primary focus of further action of the task forces would be in the framework of the Consultative Committee on Programme and Operational Questions (CCPOQ). The other mechanisms should feed the CCPOQ. Regarding resources, he said Committees were increasingly working together in joint activities but there were no funding mechanisms that reflected that joint activity. Perhaps the best approach lay in a thematic coordination mechanism that assessed if the resources required were being provided. Resources at country level were the most important, and that type of work called for a response from the donor community.
Networks were a base for the exchange of information, including on best practices, he said. They could be developed on a broader scale, and they also provided a good mechanism to interact with civil society, including the private sector.
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