It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via website content. Organizations are oblique and very little is clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they all hide their addresses.]
I’m guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar translucency if audited from outside.
It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.
Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning bureaucratic organizations staffed by a wide variety of people, a lot of funding by governments, a decent amount of authority to do these reports but not a lot of authority to actually do things.
I always wondered that whenever such reports or surveys come out why don't these organisations make the whole data and methodology public? Are they afraid that if they made it public, people will know how muddy these waters are?
They could be completely making up data or demonstrating the gold standard example of pristine data collection and brilliant analysis but we'd never know.. and for some reason, they don't want to tell us.
Or you could visit https://charitynavigator.org instead.
I’m not bagging on NGOs in particular. But it’s also how a lot of them refer to themselves.
This is more about the lack of clarity in messaging by orgs that ostensibly have a vested interest in making their progress known. At least as long as they’re engaged in public outreach.
It’s one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the execution (or not) of policy.
Very powerful tool.
A lot of NGOs/charities/foundations are simply vehicles for tax avoidance/reduction or nepotistic job creation. There are very few that are truly altruistic, or maybe once were but eventually become indistinguishable from a corporation in how they are run, and what they pay their executives.
If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the message, the likelier it is to be received.
Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.
I've volunteered with a prominent animal rescue charity for over 2 decades. While the work does require a lot of people, after you do it long enough you quickly realize bad policy is a giant contributor. For example, Texas is the only state in the US where it's illegal for shelter vets to do care on animals unless the animal is fully surrendered: https://www.humananimalsupportservices.org/blog/why-cant-vet... . So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.
There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
I don't think this is bad because you want to influence these countries in particular and inclusion here has a domestic effect. It isn't meant for grandstanding on certain values.
You could pick the most social countries for such a position, but that is more like preaching to the choir.
Council chair is a more or less ceremonial position, so it doesn't really matter all that much who's holding it. The irony of the chain being Iran is immense though.
Uhm, my understanding is that the main UN purpose is to prevent WW3. It was thansformed from the League of Nations that was created after The World War, but obviously failed on its mission with the WW2.
Having worked with WHO and ILO in Geneva... so much this. People have no idea - literally no idea - how mind-boggling the bureaucracy is inside the UN.
This is a dysfunctional org.
There the tendency of dereponsibilising tasks and delegate the hard part to someone else, as you say "directing to appropriate resources".
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
Like, if something like "Report of the Secretary-General on the staff of the United Nations Secretariat" has 5000 readers, it is 4995 more then I would expect. That is a real report I just pulled from their database. I did not bothered to read it.
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
Damn.
They are not like research studies where truth is the objective.
Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones" as it were, no one else cares.
The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.
Rules, protocol and regs are obviously necessary to some extent, but it feels like (in Europe, at least) the map has been confused with the terrain. Overly burdensome protocols are fuel for inaction and hand-wringing and, not very surprisingly, private interests have learnt to take advantage of this (e.g. lawfare)
It is tempting to adopt a "drain the swamp" mentality, but we should remember that swamps are ecosystems too.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
No one cared about the resolutions regarding Israel until now. But now that they do, it is there for Your benefit.
UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
These figures are actually pretty decent compared to the World Bank, who did a similar exercise in 2014 and found just under a third of their reports were _never_ downloaded [1].
The article discusses _only_ UN Secretariat reports, which, to my understanding, excludes most agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNHCR etc.). We're looking at a very small sliver of the UN system here, i.e., there are many, many, many reports produced by the UN that aren't discussed.
I'm struggling to find the source report for the 1,100 figure, but I think this is probably a massive under-estimate from _within_ the Secretariat, because AFAIU, the Secretariat includes the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who did >300 situation reports (sitreps) in the first half of this year.[2] I think it very unlikely sitreps constitute over half of the reports produced by the Secretariat.
Looking at the role of reports in the sector generally, it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system, indeed many are produced alongside universities. Without my cynic hat on, they've got three audiences/uses, all very similar to traditional academic publishing: 1) getting press coverage, 2) informing activities/policy, 3) informing other reports.
Like academia, you're looking at a very diverse body of work, in terms of quality, usefulness and (importantly for the discussion) breadth of relevance. You have reports with genuine, absolute humanitarian necessity, (e.g., sitreps) [2]; you have ongoing annual tracking on a range of issues [3], matters of record [4], so much navel-gazing crap on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] which are the global goals for the UN.
A lot of it is turgid, obtuse, expensively-produced crap; some of it is the canonical take on a particular issue (e.g., climate change, migration from Northern Africa to Europe) and will be used by governments when developing their policy response. Some of it will only get used by a few niche NGOs when writing their proposals for their next years' work, or as a footnote in another report which will be read by a very limited audience. Some of it will be used by humanitarian agencies to ensure they're not all delivering aid to the same region.
It's hard to defend the UN sometimes, it's certainly very easy to criticise. All in all, I agree with the comments in the thread that note that these reports aren't for a general audience. I also agree that reader count isn't necessarily a good metric: a good report with good policy recommendations that's read and implemented by a small number of policy-makers beats the shit out of the thousandth report on SDG implementation that's read by a lot of actors because it's broad enough to be relevant to more people.
Not all are a particularly good use of funds and human effort, but the same could be said of a huge chunk of academic publishing. It's also (mostly) targeted at improving the world. I'd encourage anyone getting too pissy in the thread to consider the amount of resources tech industry invests in getting people to click ads, to con people into subscriptions, to squeeze customers, undermine labour, encourage addictive behaviours and sell us stuff we don't need.
It's a very different world to the tech scene: as flawed, as diverse, as occasionally brilliant, arguably more necessary, arguably less impactful. Frustrating and fascinating in equal measure.
[^1]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fa4...
[^2]: https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%...
[^3]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923
[^4]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960
[^5]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061
> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system
Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response
And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth
I wouldn't necessarily say it _demonstrates issues_ with the academic system, but there are definitely big problems with academia it shares. Lots of overlap in terms of its function and dysfunction for sure.
> gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue
This is where the devil is in the details. So yes, absolutely, governments will chase fads/funding and cherry pick to suit their agenda, but "good" policy transfer does happen via the UN more often than some might think.
I live in a non-OECD country that's the target of a lot of recommendations via "the system". Here are a bunch of things I've seen happen here that I agree with that have been supported by this huge volume of reporting:
- maternity pay,
- permanent housing for internally displaced persons,
- an indoor smoking ban,
- proper driving tests and improved road safety laws,
- minimum standards in education (think, schools should have windows and functioning toilets),
- a land-ownership registry that vastly exceeds what's available in my (European) home country.
That's off the top of my head. It's a mixed bag, over many years, but it don't do nothing.
Like almost everyone, I have zero involvement in UN activities, and zero influence over them. Why would I read their reports?
Who indeed matters; I’m sure for many of the reports, only several people in the world actually need to read them. I used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it was a good use of my time/salary. If it’d shared it somewhere and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth writing for that person. However, it would’ve looked pathetic sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed and walked over. :)
Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
Journalism: Reading the press release.
Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
>In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally more important that it overshadows posturing.
>I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental. There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from caring about the UN?
See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.
I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.
The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
[1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155...
I think this is just wrong. The number of download does not reflect how important or impactful a report is.
Many reports are written for a narrow audience. That's fine if it provides key information necessary to make a good decision with wide impact.
I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a world-wide headline.
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4086174
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
- Environment should be protected.
- Corruption harms countries and economies.
- Extreme poverty could be eradicated with coordinated efforts.
Half of the parties in any goverment: let's just ignore all of that.
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring and won’t. ;)
In other news, I’ve begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to useless. It’s a great idea and we should have it, but the amount of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
South Africa's case to the ICJ (a UN body) was largely based on presenting to the the judges what other UN bodies had already reported and concluded on Palestinian genocide. As in report after report…
It left the ICJ in a pickle: dismissing the case on a lack of evidence meant concluding that a lot of the UN was either incompetent or dishonest.
A smart legal strategy, regardless of one's political opinion on the matter.
Careers depend on not reading some reports :)
