The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (review)

This study, commissioned by the UNDP in 2004, joins a small but growing collection of official multilateral organizational histories. It departs, though, from their descriptive, chronological emphasis. Murphy has produced a historical essay with overlapping arguments shaped by his stated normative assumptions: the value of peace and freedom, and the undesirability of severe income inequality. Murphy sees inequality "across societies" as the world's primary problem, with development as its intended solution (29).

Not surprisingly, given his subject, Murphy's unit of analysis is the nation state, and he concentrates on inequality between countries, though inequality within them emerges also as a significant challenge. He maintains that concern for other countries expressed in the provision of assistance and by means of institutions that foster and channel this "practical solidarity" are the "better way" of conducting international relations (2). He argues, too, that the UNDP's work has been more effective than that of comparable organizations because it is based on a "better" theory of development, one that not only supports the direction chosen by developing country governments, but also advocates for the participation of all citizens in those decisions (3). He also states that the UNDP exhibits many of the traits of a learning organization, thus providing a crucial model of institutional reform within the U.N. system.

With less justification, his history focuses on individuals, mostly men in positions of administrative and intellectual leadership at the UNDP. Though acknowledging situations like Rwanda in the late 1990s, where no one person could make a significant difference, Murphy does not explain clearly what differentiates these from the presumed norm. While the role of individuals in development is starting to receive attention, and historians have long debated the role of individuals in the processes of social change, Murphy does not engage with these issues. He also spends less time analyzing the current context of development ideas and action than he does that of the 1940s to 1980s.

Murphy does present a history of the UNDP, though readers need to extract it from the details of these arguments. Murphy describes the predecessor programs from which the UNDP was formed in 1966, and the emergence of its organizational culture and practices. He highlights the crucial behind-the-scenes roles that UNDP personnel have played in the last five decades: transferring expertise and technology, creating networks, building infrastructures, managing difficult national transitions, and engaging with pariah movements and governments. While drawing examples from a number of countries, he devotes an entire chapter to Ghana's Volta River project. There are extensive and interesting sections on processes of institutional change, and on the UNDP's movement from an approach of "development as efficiency" to one of "development as freedom." Given that this is the first significant published history of the UNDP, drawing the institution's chronology a bit more clearly into the foreground would have been helpful, especially for readers not already familiar with the U.N. family.

This book is based on archival research and interviews carried out in sixteen developing countries, as well as in U.N. centers and some donor countries. The manuscript was reviewed by a UNDP Advisory Panel and Readers' Group, a process that seems to have produced the "work of genuinely independent scholarship" that the UNDP wanted (ix), though it likely reinforced the dynamic of writing for those familiar with the institution. Murphy ably draws together scholarship from several fields, particularly international relations and organizational studies. A bibliography would have been helpful, though. Currently readers must look at Murphy's other recent publications to get a sense of the literature on which he draws in formulating the arguments that are at the core of this book.