{"id":114683,"date":"2013-11-13T00:19:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-12T18:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=114683"},"modified":"2013-11-17T01:32:45","modified_gmt":"2013-11-16T20:02:45","slug":"lakshman-kadirgamar-the-challenges-for-international-organizations-and-multilateralism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/lakshman-kadirgamar-the-challenges-for-international-organizations-and-multilateralism\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakshman Kadirgamar: The Challenges For International Organizations And Multilateralism"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Francis Gurry<\/span><\/a> –\u00a0<\/strong>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Francis Gurry<\/p><\/div>\n

Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration 2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am deeply honoured to have been asked to deliver the 2013 Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Oration.\u00a0 I first met Lakshman in 1984 in Sydney, when he interviewed me for a position at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) where he was, at the time, the Director of the Bureau for Asia and the Pacific.\u00a0 I worked for Lakshman for three years, from 1985 until he returned to Sri Lanka in 1988, and had the opportunity to travel with him on a number of occasions to his beloved Asia, to which he was so profoundly attached and which he incarnated in so many ways.<\/p>\n

It was a deeply enriching experience to work with Lakshman Kadirgamar<\/span><\/a>. \u00a0Of the many things that he taught me, there is one that always stands out for me because it was something that could be acquired only from a person of culture and experience, as opposed to a book.\u00a0 It might be called the principle of timing.\u00a0 Instinctively, whenever a decision needed to be taken, Lakshman would ask: \u201cIs the timing right?\u201d\u00a0 I am often called to remember this teaching, either because I have failed to respect it and find that, upon reflection, my predicament is a consequence of my lack of sensitivity to timing, or because I have paid attention to timing and am able to see how that attention has been rewarded by an enhanced understanding of a particular situation.\u00a0 It has always seemed to me to be a lesson from the depths of Asian experience and wisdom.\u00a0 I know that one encounters it in other cultures.\u00a0 The Book of Ecclesiastes, for example, reminds us that \u201cTo every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven\u201d[2]<\/a>, and Shakespeare had Brutus say that \u201cThere is a tide in the affairs of\u00a0men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune\u201d[3]<\/a>.\u00a0 For Lakshman, timing was an instinctive reference point that placed a decision in a larger social and cultural context than our penchant for quantitative and computed analysis allows.\u00a0 It was a non-egocentric view of things, one that saw events as part of a larger continuum.<\/p>\n

This broader appreciation of connection also inspired Lakshman\u2019s attachment to international cooperation and to international organizations.\u00a0 He served two United Nations agencies, having worked for the International Labour Organization (ILO) before joining WIPO.\u00a0 As it was international organizations that brought me into contact with Lakshman Kadirgamar, it is their condition and the state of their brand of universal multilateralism[4]<\/a> in the contemporary world that I would like to explore this evening.\u00a0 I should say at the outset that this is a vast subject.\u00a0 My exploration will necessarily be a very selective one.<\/p>\n

There are many signs that times are not very propitious for action or coordination through international organizations and universal multilateralism.\u00a0 \u00a0Both international organizations and multilateralism are facing enormous challenges.<\/p>\n

In the first place, we see that the capacity to agree internationally is very limited.\u00a0 In consequence, successful multilateral rule making is now a rare occurrence.\u00a0 In 2012, for example, a grand total of four new multilateral treaties were<\/p>\n

concluded.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 If I am not mistaken, 2013 is likely to produce a similarly poor harvest of only around three new multilateral treaties[6]<\/a>, with a successful Bali Ministerial Conference for the World Trade Organization providing a possible fourth.\u00a0 In contrast, the complexity of the contemporary world has legislative authorities busy in all other instances.\u00a0 Nationally, legislative agendas are so full that it is challenge to succeed in having a subject figure on the agenda.\u00a0 Bilaterally, an indeterminate, but large, number of free trade agreements are under negotiation or are being concluded, as are several high-profile plurilateral trade agreements.\u00a0 Likewise, many regional organizations are actively pursuing normative agendas.<\/p>\n

The absence of need or a shortage of appropriate subject matter for multilateral attention would seem to be an unlikely explanation for the lack of multilateral outcomes.\u00a0 Globalization, population growth, urbanization, technology and interconnection have produced a regrettably long list of suitable problems, many of which seem inherently to lie beyond the power of any one State to resolve because they involve the movement of persons, arms, pollution, diseases, capital, products or ideas across multiple borders.\u00a0 Indeed, the enumeration of potentially suitable subjects would suggest that the size of the capacity for multilateral policy response is varying in inverse proportion to the size of the problems.<\/p>\n

The size and number of issues calling for attention and the paucity of outcomes seems to have spawned a rich array of plurilateral groupings of States, groupings that are multilateral in the sense of involving more than two States, but not\u00a0universally multilateral like the United Nations and its specialized agencies.\u00a0 The G20 is a salient example of this development, but there are many others, particularly in the area of trade, which seems to be the next most prominent source of transnational groupings after religion.\u00a0 A non-exhaustive list of trade groupings between States would include a growing list of abbreviations and acronyms, notably the Andean Community,[7]<\/a> APEC,[8]<\/a> CARICOM,[9]<\/a> EFTA,[10]<\/a> MERCOSUR,[11]<\/a> NAFTA,[12]<\/a> OPEC,[13]<\/a> Pacific Alliance,[14]<\/a> SADC[15]<\/a> and UEMOA[16]<\/a>.\u00a0 This listing does not include ASEAN or the EU, which, in a sense, started as trade groupings and expanded their cooperation into other areas.\u00a0 The feature that all these groupings share in common is that they were not formed to pursue their objectives within the ambit of operations of international organizations, but were established to pursue their objectives outside of, although not necessarily inconsistently with, the operations of universal multilateral organizations.\u00a0 Many, if not most, of these organizations or groupings have a normative function.\u00a0 To some extent, they may be considered to be special interest groups, but many of them may also be considered to be coalitions of the impatient, eager to advance where the universal multilateral organizations are unable to do so.<\/p>\n

Outside of the normative area, competition to the classical international organizations can also be seen in the operational, development and humanitarian areas.\u00a0 Far from being spaces occupied bidimensionally by the classical international organizations, on the one hand, and by States pursuing bilateral agendas, on the other hand, these areas are now populated by a rich variety of actors of varying public and private compositions.\u00a0 Health is the area where this proliferation is the most obvious.\u00a0 The World Health Organization (WHO) has been joined in the international arena by a multiplicity of other actors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNAIDS, the GAVI Alliance, PATH, the Clinton Foundation, the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT) and a host of other public-private partnerships.<\/p>\n

These developments suggest that there is an evolution underway in the manner in which international cooperation and action is undertaken.\u00a0 The classical international organizations face competition from two sources – from non-universal multilateralism and from hybrid organizations.\u00a0 Why is this occurring?\u00a0 There are many possible explanations, but I would like to highlight four contributing factors \u2013 the pace of technological change, geopolitical shifts, the changing definition of the public function and the digital environment.<\/p>\n

The speed of technological change poses a severe challenge for organizations whose procedures and processes are built upon the slow accumulation of historical experience.\u00a0 One can see technological change in a long-term or a short-term perspective.\u00a0 In the long term, we see that the gap between radical technological changes that produce fundamental transformations of human societies is narrowing.\u00a0 It took humanity five million years to progress from the point where it began walking on two feet, thus freeing its hands for purposes other than locomotion, to the development of the first stone tools, then 1.8 million years to the mastery of fire, 700,000 years to the agrarian revolution, only 12,000 years to the industrial revolution and a mere 140 years to the\u00a0information revolution.\u00a0 In the short term, we see that the last 30 years have produced fundamental change in our way of communicating, with widespread penetration of the Internet and mobile telephony throughout the world, as well as the beginnings of profound changes in the life sciences, with genetic engineering followed by nanotechnology, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine.<\/p>\n

In either the long-term or the short-term perspective, we can observe that history is accelerating.\u00a0 In contrast, universal multilateral processes are inherently slow.\u00a0 They require lengthy process in order to enable all nations, with varying degrees of development and major information and knowledge asymmetries, to be comfortable with the perception and analysis of problems and the democratic development of responses.\u00a0 The contrast between the speed of technological change and the consequent social transformations, on the one hand, and the pace of multilateral responses is stark.\u00a0 It constitutes a major incentive for those States that are \u201cready\u201d to tackle a perceived problem to proceed to do so without waiting for the multilateral ritual to unfold.<\/p>\n

The acceleration of history is evident also in the speed with which geopolitical shift is occurring.\u00a0 There are many measures of this shift \u2013 in demographics, where Europe and North America\u2019s share of world population is estimated to decline to 12% by 2050[17]<\/a>; in economic production, where the share of global production of Europe and North America was 68% in 1950 and is estimated to decline to 30% by 2050[18]<\/a>; and in technological production, where Asia now produces 45% of science, technology and engineering graduates and 38% of all international patent applications, in contrast to 31% for the 38 countries that are party to the European Patent Convention or 27% for the United States of America.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical change, and the speed with which it is occurring, presents a challenge of adaptation for the international organizations.\u00a0 There is a growing disjunction between economic reality and political architecture.\u00a0 The political\u00a0architecture of the multilateral system, whether in terms of the institutionalized distribution of power, definitions of political groupings, or location on the scale of development, is based on the economic reality of the world at the end of Second World War and the decades that followed it until the 1990s.\u00a0 Change is working its way through the system, but it has not yet found its full institutional expression.\u00a0 A lack of correspondence between economic reality and political architecture is a fertile breeding ground for lack of trust, that fragile commodity upon which the possibility of a shared view of a problem and its solution and, thus, agreement rests.<\/p>\n

A third contributing factor to the challenges faced by the classical international organizations is a blurring of the distinction between public and private that has occurred in many parts of the world over the past two decades.\u00a0 While it is difficult to generalize about this across a diverse world, a wave of privatization swept much of the world in the 1990s, reducing the public function and enlarging the private function.\u00a0 At the same time, changing notions of corporate social responsibility, as well as the rapid accumulation of fortunes from the IT revolution, saw private individuals and enterprises become more active in public policy challenges on a scale and with an organizational effort that had previously only been seen in public organizations.\u00a0 Again, the field of health springs to mind and, with it, the examples of child vaccination, the elimination of polio or the alleviation of neglected tropical diseases.\u00a0 The entry of private individuals, organizations and foundations into fields traditionally managed by public organizations has increased the competition for voluntary funding on which so many of the international organizations have come to rely in addition to their regular budgets in order to prosecute their programs – competition, it might be added, from actors who are necessarily more agile and adaptable than the international organizations.<\/p>\n

A final factor that may be mentioned is the new digital environment.\u00a0 This environment has a multiplicity of implications and consequences for international organizations.\u00a0 Let me name just three.<\/p>\n

In the first place, it has empowered a range of actors, usually non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to participate in policy discussions by putting them on an equal information footing with States and by linking them throughout the world.\u00a0\u00a0 The Internet has busted the State\u2019s monopoly on information, one of the bases on which it could claim the authority to make policy, and has facilitated the creation of networks of all conceivable varieties – social, political, economic, cultural, scientific and technological.\u00a0 It has, in short, created a shift in access to information and knowledge and in the capacity to use knowledge for all sorts of purposes.\u00a0 The number of NGOs with a presence in Geneva, for example, is now 250 (compared to 35 intergovernmental organizations).\u00a0 At WIPO, in 1970, there were 35 NGOs accredited to the WIPO Assemblies as observers.\u00a0 There are now 307.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the Internet and social media have changed the way in which we communicate as a species.\u00a0 One may legitimately ask whether anyone under the age of 30 reads the documents that issue from international secretariats.\u00a0 Soon it will be under 40, and then 50 and so on.\u00a0 Can international organizations capture the imagination of the public without engaging in a radical change of communication methods, and will member States allow secretariats to do so?\u00a0 And yet we have seen the power of social media to engage public action in so many examples in the recent past.\u00a0 But where would the mantra of member-State-driven find itself in the twittersphere?<\/p>\n

Thirdly, the digital environment is also producing the phenomenon of big data, meaning the vast amount of data that is being generated from all the electronic devices, connections and terminals that we increasingly use to transact our daily social and economic existence, together with the new techniques that have been developed to process and to analyse those data.\u00a0 Up until now, big data has\u00a0mainly been used by the commercial sector to find better ways to sell things.\u00a0 But its real value \u201clies in our ability to extract insights and make better decisions\u201d[19]<\/a> and, as such, it has enormous potential in social, economic, development and humanitarian policy.\u00a0 But it involves an entirely different methodology from the classical multilateral processes of identifying problems and developing solutions through discussion in meetings held at six-monthly intervals to enable national consultations with interested parties between meetings.<\/p>\n

What results from this brief review of some of the salient agents of change affecting international organizations is a picture of great complexity.\u00a0 International cooperation now takes place in a world of multiple speeds and layers (national, bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral), multiple dimensions (public, private and a range of mixtures of both) and multiple power balances (economic, financial, political, people, information, idea, diplomatic and military).\u00a0 The one-dimensional world of a single balance of political power seems to be becoming a thing of the past.\u00a0 It was suggested in the New York Times, for example, that \u201cthere may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.\u201d[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

This complexity is not necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 It may be considered to be an evolution of the international community from a rather simple one in which there was only bilateral action or international cooperation through the UN and its agencies to a more mature state that mirrors the complexity of the globalized, interconnected world.\u00a0 But, just as the globalized, interconnected world has heightened our vulnerability to disease, financial crashes and economic crises, so the multispeed, multi-dimensional and multi-powered international community has a number of inherent risks compared to the more simplified international community that it leaves behind.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me enumerate some of the main ones, more by way of questions than by analysis.<\/p>\n

A first risk is one of incoherence.\u00a0 Who is the keeper of coherence in the complex world of multiple instances making rules and undertaking programs of action?\u00a0 Ideally, one might imagine a world of Russian dolls, in which one set of rules fits neatly into the next, with the universal multilateral perhaps the biggest doll, in the sense of the most general, and each other layer being smaller, in the sense of more detailed, until you reach the national doll.<\/p>\n

A second risk is exclusion.\u00a0 The great advantages of the system of universal multilateralism are inclusiveness and legitimacy.\u00a0 Those advantages are costly in terms of process, which often leads to the frustration that drives the resort to other instances.\u00a0 So there is a balance to be achieved between process expense, on the one hand, and efficiency, on the other hand, with inclusiveness, legitimacy and effectiveness the consequences of the choice.\u00a0 Democracy is not necessarily adopted for its efficiency.\u00a0 The risk of exclusion is related to the risk of unequal strength.\u00a0 Arguably, the weakest are most protected in the multilateral environment.<\/p>\n

A third risk is the lack of appropriate governance and accountability frameworks for the new world of multiple powers and instances.\u00a0 However imperfect they may be, there are governance and accountability frameworks that have been developed for the classical international organizations.\u00a0 What frameworks apply to NGOs, public-private partnerships or even the participation of classical international organizations in public-private partnerships?\u00a0 This is relatively undeveloped territory.\u00a0 I certainly do not want to denigrate some of the magnificent work being done by some of the newer forms of organizations active on the international stage, so please understand the example that I am about to give as one offered for the sake of illustration.\u00a0 If a foundation decides to tackle a certain health challenge or to eliminate a certain disease, who takes this decision?\u00a0 Why is one health challenge or disease considered more important, more appropriate or more urgent than another?\u00a0 What are the economic and social consequences of the choice on different parts of the world?\u00a0 What are the collateral effects of shifting resources into a particular area?\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 I ask\u00a0these questions, as I said, not by way of criticism, but by way of illustration.\u00a0 Once a private organization enters a field of pubic action, I am not sure that the answer to these questions can simply be \u201cit is our resources and we shall do what we want with them\u201d.<\/p>\n

The world of classical international organizations and universal multilateralism offers some assurances against certain of the risks of the new international community.\u00a0 But I think that it is insufficient to rely upon these assurances to react against or to oppose evolution.\u00a0 Rather, we should look to see how we might be able to preserve the advantages of universal multilateralism, while at the same time adapting to the new circumstances of a fast-changing world.\u00a0 For that, the international organizations will need to acquire, especially, speed and agility, the characteristics needed for survival in the new world.\u00a0 This is the challenge that lies before them.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1]<\/a> Director General, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).\u00a0 The views expressed in this paper are personal and do not represent the views of the Member States of WIPO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> Ecclesiastes 3, King James Version<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a> Julius Caesar, Act 4, scene 3, 218-219<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a> Strictly, multilateralism is \u201cthe practice of co-ordinating national policies in groups of three or more states\u201d (Robert O. Keohane, \u201cMultilateralism:\u00a0 An Agenda for Research\u201d (1990) International Journal<\/i> 45; see John Gerard Ruggie (1992) \u201cMultilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution\u201d46 International Organization<\/i> 561-598).\u00a0 In this presentation, however, I shall be using the term \u201cmultilateralism\u201d in the sense of the universal multilateralism associated with the United Nations and international organizations whose membership is potentially open to all states and in contrast to plurilateralism, regionalism and bilateralism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/a> Protocol to the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment on Matters Specific to Space Assets, concluded on March 9, 2012; Food Assistance Convention, concluded on April 25, 2012; Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances, concluded on June 26, 2012; and Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products, concluded on November 12, 2012.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6]<\/a> The Minamata Convention on Mercury, concluded on January 19, 2013; Arms Trade Treaty, concluded on April 2, 2103; and Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired or otherwise Print Disabled, concluded on June 27, 2013.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7]<\/a> Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8]<\/a> Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, which comprises 21 Pacific Rim member economies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9]<\/a> The Caribbean Community, an association of 15 States and dependencies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[10]<\/a> European Free Trade Association, comprising four States \u2013 Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[11]<\/a> Mercado Com\u00fan del Sur<\/i>, an agreement among five States \u2013 Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, with Bolivia in the process of accession.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[12]<\/a> North America Free Trade Agreement, covering Canada, Mexico and the United States of America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[13]<\/a> Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, an organization with 12 member countries \u2013 Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[14]<\/a> Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[15]<\/a> Southern African Development Community, with 15 member States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[16]<\/a> West African Economic and Monetary Union, which comprises eight member States – Benin, Burkina Faso, C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[17]<\/a> See Jack A. Goldstone, \u201cThe New Population Bomb\u201d (2010) Foreign Affairs<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[18]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[19]<\/a> Dr. Michael Rappa, http:\/\/analytics.ncsu.edu\/?p=4770<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[20]<\/a> Patrick E. Tyler, \u201cThreats and Responses\u00a0: News Analysis\u00a0; A New Power in the Streets\u201d New York Times<\/i> February 17, 2003<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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