The Failure of the United Nations Development Programs for Africa (review)

My favorite aspect of this book was the author's discussion of the United Nations General Assembly processes that led to the United Nations Program of Action for the African Economic Recovery and Development (UNPAAERD) and the United Nations New Agenda for the Development of Africa (UNNADAF). Ratsimbaharison alleges that the United Nations erred in allowing its programs to be formulated chiefly by African nations without adequate input from the wider body of nations, and then adopted without a formal vote. No wonder donor nations did not fund or support these initiatives! No wonder they failed miserably! The United Nations failed to rally the international community, failed to coordinate disparate development efforts, failed to charge a single specific entity with the responsibility of administering its programs, and failed to learn adequately from the failure of its first program in developing its successor. Hopefully, students of international relations can learn from this scathing account of U.N. General Assembly failures, even if the assembly itself could not.

The critical kernel can be summed up succinctly: process matters. How the United Nations goes about formulating its programs exerts a strong influence on its capacity to achieve its programmatic goals. In adopting programs rooted in dependency-informed perspectives expressed through the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and Africa's Priority Program for Economic Recovery (APPER), these programs were little more than another outlet for the regional bodies to express their development priorities. Clearly, development programs have to be acceptable to both donors and recipients, as the author recommends. Unfortunately, Ratsimbaharison fails to offer concrete suggestions for improving U.N. General Assembly processes. Instead, he suggests the United Nations follow the path of the International Monetary Fund, recommending (1) eschewing regional programs and dealing only with specific nations and (2) embedding programs within the context of the global economy. I find these recommendations baffling because, whatever their advantages or disadvantages, IMF negotiations with its member states can hardly be described as model processes of transparency and accountability.

Case studies of Madagascar and Mauritius are included to demonstrate the uselessness of regional programs, because they reflect uniqueness prevalent among the region's nation-states. Ratsimbaharison characterizes both the Malagasy national development strategy and the UNPAAERD and UNNADAF programs there as "inward-looking," at odds with the prevailing economic trends embodied in structural-adjustment programs. Mauritius, in contrast, was "outward-looking," one of the more-successful African nations, and one that actively pursued a strategy of export-oriented industrialization. Old fashioned U.N. programs would have been useless, maybe even harmful, if they had been implemented in this Indian Ocean economy.

The moral, of course, is that the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, offered the only viable path to development, the path winding through austerity, SAPs, export-processing zones, liberalization, and so on. Consistent with IMF operating procedures and practices, the specific adjustment policies should be decided on a case-by-case basis (regional prescriptions are too constraining), and should ensure that each nation optimize its economic niche within the global economy.

I had hoped for a different conclusion. Of course the U.N. General Assembly should not be a mouthpiece for the OAU, adopting programs without even putting it up for a vote. But neither should the United Nations be constrained to development projects and orientations consistent with the "prevailing economic order," or the global financial institutions to support it. The United Nations must attempt to be an institution within which a continuous dialog can take place, a dialog in which individual nations, regional bodies, global financial institutions, and international NGOs can all have a voice. U.N.-supported regional development programming need not overly constrain national programs, and they have the potential to foster cooperation in furthering trade and communications among Africa's nation-states, as regional trade associations (North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union) have done elsewhere.

Ratsimbaharison's recommendations that U.N...