I have been following the process of the election of a new Director General of UNESCO. (The nominations are now in, the Executive Board of UNESCO is expected to endorse a candidate in September, and the election will take place during the General Conference meeting in October.) I have been posting on the process in:
- UNESCO's Friends group on LinkedIn, of which I am a manager,
- The Americans for UNESCO Twitter site, which I manage
I have read several times that the Arab nations feel that it is their turn to name a Director General of UNESCO. That perception worries me!
In part that feeling is based on an informal agreement among nations that the top offices of the intergovernmental organizations should be "fairly" distributed among nations. There is, in my mind, merit to that perception.
Over its history, the top job in UNESCO has always gone to men (which is especially odd since women play so important a role in education and culture, and are playing a more and more important role in science, libraries, and communications). Most of the Directors General have come from wealthy nations, indeed disproportionately from Europe and the United States. If one assumes that each Director General leaves an imprint on the organization, then it makes sense that there should be balance among the Directors General, with women as well as men chosen and people from developing as well as developed nations.
It is estimated that there are 6.67 billion people in the world. It would be fatuous to think that only one of them is "best qualified" to lead UNESCO or that there would be any possibility of identifying that "best qualified" candidate. Still, given the potential of UNESCO to make a real difference in the world's efforts to promote peace, education, science, culture and communications, and the real difference that the quality of the Director General can have in realizing that potential, it is important that a strong and capable person be elected to the post of Director General. That has not always happened, and the current candidates do not seem measure up to past Directors General such as Julian Huxley (a very talented scientist and scientific administrator) and Luther Evans (who had been Librarian of Congress, managing the world's largest and arguably most important library).
Since the Director General is elected by a vote of the representatives of the member states of UNESCO, and since developing nations have agreed to vote as a block, they have the right under UNESCO's Constitution to choose the next Director General. That right carries with it a responsibility. In the first case, the member nations have the responsibility to nominate candidates who would do a good job, and in the second, to elect the best candidate. If the nations have failed to nominate a really great candidate from a developing nation, then they would seem to have the duty to elect one from a developed nation (or to call for a new set of nominees--UNESCO has been lead by an acting Director General in the past).
There are four women among the nine people who have been nominated for the post. Two of the nominees are from North Africa, two from sub-Saharan Africa, one from South America, and four from Europe. I have met none of them, but it seems clear that they are not all comparably likely to do a good job if elected Director General. I sincerely hope that the representatives of the member states do their duty and elect the best qualified candidate. I fear, however, that that objective may be lost in the political machinations that will surely take place over the next few months.
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