12 September 2000
World Commission on Dams: Model for UN Policy Networks?
WCD Cited By UN Authors as 'Coalition for Change'

"The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organisations, the business community, and civil society."

-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on UN's challenge.

CAPE TOWN, Sept. 12 -- In advance of the UN Millennium Conference, where leaders redefined the UN's approach to decision-making and consensus-building, a newly published book has cited the World Commission on Dams as a critical partnership and networking model for the UN to follow and perhaps even adapt in the immediate decades ahead.

The timing is crucial. In his Millennium Report - We, the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century - Annan emphasised the urgent need for global public policy networks to help rethink and overhaul the role and operations of the UN:

"Formal institutional arrangements may often lack the scope, speed and informational capacity to keep up with the rapidly changing global agenda," he said. By contrast, "Mobilising the skills and other resources of diverse global actors, therefore, may increasingly involve forming loose and temporary global policy networks that cut across national, institutional and disciplinary lines," he said. "The United Nations is well situated to nurture such informal 'coalitions for change' across our various areas of responsibility."

The World Commission on Dams -- working in close partnership with half a dozen UN Agencies - in particular the UN Environment Program and Ted Turner's UN Foundation -- is well situated to embody it. Scheduled to present its Final Report to the UN on the 17th of November, in New York, the WCD stands as the archetype of that 'coalition for change,' according to a new report by Wolfgang Reinicke and Francis Deng, written in support of the UN Secretary General's Millennium Report. The authors cite it as an emerging model that responds directly to the challenges set by Mr Annan.

"The case of the WCD demonstrates how an almost archetypical trisectoral (government, private sector and civil society organisations) network operating at the global level can contribute to building consensual knowledge and overcoming stalemate in a policy arena riven with conflict," Reinicke and Deng observe in Critical Choices, The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance.

"The example of the WCD shows that establishing a basic measure of trust among actors in a conflict-ridden environment is time-consuming and costly, but launching a sustainable mechanism for consensus-building and standards- setting requires no less… Inclusiveness, openness, and transparency are the key principles of the WCD. Its structure, process, and funding are all trisectoral. Through a number of local reviews of existing dams, the WCD involved both supporters and opponents of dam projects in the gathering of knowledge. This body of knowledge on the complex social, economic, and ecological implications of dam building is helping to close both the operational and the participatory gaps."

For more on the UN Millennium Summit, see www.un.org/millennium/summit.htm
For more on the book Critical Choices by Reinicke and Deng, see www.globalpublicpolicy.net