Thinking About the Evaluation of UNESCO

I find that it is almost impossible to evaluate UNESCO well, as evaluation is generally understood. Of course, it is possible to monitor various aspects of the implementation of UNESCO's program. Of course it is quite reasonable to ask for a group of interested experts to advise on UNESCO and how it might improve its work; the Independent External Evaluation of UNESCO seems to me to be useful in the latter sense. It is also possible for a funding agency to get external advice as to whether to continue its support to UNESCO. the recent review by the UK's DfID provides that kind of advice, albeit advice with which I largely disagree. But for reasons described below I think that such reviews should not be called evaluations.

The objectives of UNESCO

UNESCO was planned during the second of two world wars and came into being in immediately after the war. The initial planning came out of the Committee of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME), and CAME would have focused on the needed rebuilding of the educational and cultural infrastructure of allied Europe which was being destroyed during the war. On the other hand, the U.S. Government was opposed to creating UNESCO to implement reconstruction programs, preferring other mechanisms for that purpose. What was decided instead was that UNESCO would seek to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men. (UNESCO only began to carry out reconstruction and development programs in Africa much after its founding.) Of course no one knew how to build these defenses, but UNESCO was given a statement of its purpose:

The purpose of the Organization is to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations.

Thus the purpose of UNESCO was to promote social and cultural changes in nations, and specifically those changes that would contribute to peace and security. Certainly the highest priority would be to help protect against a third world war, a war which it was thought would be fought with nuclear weapons.

• What specific changes have the greatest power in contributing to peace and security?
• What changes are most cost-effective in reaching for peace and security?
• How do the many changes that might contribute to peace and security interrelate?
• Are there negative impacts of these changes?
• What tools consistent with UNESCO's emphasis on education, science, culture and communications are available to affect social and cultural changes in the desired directions?
• How effective are these tools?

These questions could not have been answered with any confidence in 1945 and still can not be answered with confidence. The best that has been done is to propose that UNESCO's mission involves the promotion of humanism on a global basis.

While UNESCO is a constitutional organization, its short term program and budget and its mid term goals and objectives are determined by its governing bodies. In response to the changing global situation and the changing composition of its governing bodies, UNESCO has evolved over the decades and its system of goals and objectives have changed.

I find it hard to understand how functions that have been foisted on UNESCO relate to the humanism that would contribute to peace and security. The Declaration Against Doping in Sports and the promotion of multilingualism on the Internet seem at best to have only distant relation to peace and security. In fact, UNESCO deals with a vast array of specific objectives with little understanding of how they combine to achieve the overall purpose give in the Constitution -- if they do so at all.

The Structure of UNESCO

UNESCO is not like the corporate or national governmental organizations for which much of management theory has been built. It must be seen as an intergovernmental organization, with implicit objectives of accommodating the differing concerns of its member states, balancing its staff geographically, and avoiding siding with one or another faction in the diplomatic alliances that infect its governing bodies.

While there is a UNESCO Secretariat that to some degree corresponds to the organizations for which management theory was developed, the organization has decentralized and is surrounded by a huge network that has affiliated itself with the Organization. 

Portions of UNESCO have been created to implement terms of international conventions and not only have their own goals and objectives but their own governing bodies. Consider also the Category I and Category II Institutes and Centers of UNESCO. The Category I organizations have their own governing bodies, charters, and receive funding from donors other than UNESCO; the Category II centers are still more independent. 

To identify UNESCO with only its Secretariat would be to make a fundamental error in understanding. The spirit of UNESCO is also embodied in a huge network of partners that have chosen to affiliate with the Organization. These partners have their own understanding of the purposes, goals and objectives of UNESCO, and bring to their partnerships their own goals and objectives. Not only don't these networks obey the governance of UNESCO in carrying out programs and activities, they would be unlikely to provide evaluators with detailed information on what they do, why they do it, and what their impact has been.

Resource Constraints

The financial resources of UNESCO's Secretariat are fairly evenly distributed between assessed contributions and extrabudgetary resources. While the assessed contributions of the regular budget are at least nominally programmed by UNESCO's governance, countries donate other resources tied to their own purposes. Thus the budget of UNESCO's Secretariat is not only beset by uncertainties, but is specifically intended to achieve a complex set of objectives, only some of which are those of the Organization. 

Extending out into the network, which includes many volunteers and voluntary organizations, there is much less explicit tying of budget to UNESCO's objectives, much less formal management toward UNESCO's purposes, and much less accountability to UNESCO and its funders.

Human resources available to UNESCO are in fact people with their own objectives. That is of course true of any formal organization, but in the case of UNESCO the staff is multinational and multiethnic, with a Director General elected by the members states in a process that is intended not only to obtain the best leader possible, but to satisfice all the factions in the governing bodies and to achieve regional balances historically and within the UN system.

Results 

The statement of UNESCO's purpose itself recognizes that UNESCO could at best contribute to peace and security; achieving peace and security would require other actions by other parties. The budget of UNESCO, which is less than that of my local school system, is very small with respect to the global educational, scientific and cultural enterprise, and thus the impact of UNESCO on global society must be relatively modest in any given year or decade.

Moreover, everyone realizes that that purpose is to be achieved over historic time, not the two year term between elections of American congressmen, nor the four year term of office of an American President, nor the decade that a UNESCO Director General can expect to serve. Indeed, it is far from having been achieved in 66 years since UNESCO was founded.

Thus UNESCO has an incompletely defined purpose, which is to contribute marginally for a very long time to a poorly understood process, which specific goals and objectives changing over time, implemented not only by a multinational, multi-ethnic Secretariat with governance shared with other bodies and a budget implementing other objectives as well as its own, and a huge network of affiliates with their own purposes, goals and objectives, little accountable to UNESCO or its governance. How do you evaluate that?

So What?

Not everything that is worth doing can be captured in numbers! It still seems reasonable that the world can become more peaceful and security be increased if cultures change to become less warlike and more oriented towards international cooperation and understanding. It seems reasonable that the changes will be in the minds of men, and that it will be through the development of intellectual institutions that those changes will be achieved. It seems right that UNESCO's objectives have been broadened to include the reduction of poverty and the social and economic development as ends in themselves; these ends are not incompatible with a culture of peace and indeed may be necessary if a culture of peace is to exist. It seems reasonable that a multinational approach is helpful in that UNESCO provides a forum in which nations can debate on the institutional and cultural changes that are desirable and the means that are desirable to achieve them, and by coming to agreement on such issues increase the likelihood that they will be achieved nationally and internationally. It seems clear that UNESCO has contributed to the development of educational, scientific and cultural institutions in many nations and internationally. It seems clear that the job is better done by the Secretariat plus the affiliated networks than would be the case were the Secretariat to go it alone. And of course, it seems obvious that UNESCO could do better than it has done, and that it can with proper direction do better in the future.