Global Dominance Group

GEO POLITICS.....GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

2008-03-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

GEO POLITICS.....GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
Submitted by h.hoffman on Wed, 13/02/2008 - 21:28.

* Geo Politics..Global Governance

The Transatlantic Policy Network seeks EU-style integration for the European Union and the USA by 2015. We've been talking of this for at least 2 years Oh and by the way..what do you think is happening in Malta..Middle East and European Union Dialogue !!!!!Thats next!!!!!

Planning Underway for an EU-USA Common Market
Bill Hahn JBS
Wednesday February 13, 2008
The Transatlantic Policy Network seeks EU-style integration for the European Union and the USA by 2015.

Follow this link to the original source: "Creating a Transatlantic Common Market" or see end of this article

Even with all of the recent attention given to the North American Union (NAU) and its deep integration of trade markets in Canada, Mexico and the USA, it seems another effort at trade integration is underway. This time the plan is for greater integration of the European Union and the United States, and much like the Security and Prosperity Partnership of the NAU, the Transatlantic Union (TAU) is being quietly created.

According to an exclusive at TheNewAmerican.com, a little known NGO (non governmental organization) called the Transatlantic Policy Network, has been working behind the scenes to advance plans to merge the United States with Europe. The article states, "Working carefully, if quietly, since the early 1990s, the organization has moved quickly to gain the agreement of leaders on both sides of the ocean that further integration is necessary and desirable. Now, the organization is much closer to achieving its goals than anyone would suspect."

A paper published early last year by the organization entitled, "Completing the Transatlantic Market," states: "It is time for a complementary, top down approach to transatlantic cooperation through a joint commitment by the European Union and the United States to a roadmap for achieving a Transatlantic Market by 2015 and creation of an overarching framework for dialogue and action to achieve that goal."

The big difference between the NAU and the TAU is that Congress has already passed legislation embracing the TAU concept. H. Res. 390 was passed in late 2003 and states that the "United States and the European community are aware of their shared responsibility, not only to further transatlantic security, but to address other common interests such as environmental protection, poverty reduction, combating international crime and promoting human rights, and to work together to meet those transnational challenges which affect the well-being of all." To do this, TheNewAmerican.com points out that laws and regulations would need to be harmonized before any integration could begin.

While Americans were alarmed at this step in the NAU, especially considering how Mexico would need to be brought up to the US and Canada’s standards, we need to be similarly alarmed at the effort to meld the US into a transatlantic common market. Remember that the EU started as a common market that has now morphed into EU citizens not being able to vote on a new constitution, not having local representation (Parliament is forced to regularly travel to Brussels to approve or disapprove a mountain of legislation that they have not seen before) and not having individual national sovereignty for each of the 27 member countries. Rather, all countries are lumped together under a centralized EU bureaucracy.

The political union of Europe did not appear over night, but it did evovle from a European common market. Likewise, the U.S. would not likely undergo a political merger with Europe in the short term. But the natural progression, as demonstrated by the experience of Europe since World War II, is for economic union of the type required for a common market to lead, inexorably, to political union at some point in the future. This is just the sort of entangling alliance the Founding Fathers warned us about. They intended the USA to be independent of Europe. Present day Americans would do well to heed their wisdom.

=======================

European Union
Creating a Transatlantic Common Market
By: Dennis Behreandt
February 7, 2008
Practically everyone has heard of the efforts made by the Bush administration to advance the integration of the United States with Canada and Mexico in what many have called a North American Union. This magazine has distributed nearly 1 million copies of a special issue on the subject, CNN’s Lou Dobbs frequently discusses the issue on his nightly news program, and presidential candidate Ron Paul has even discussed the NAU during some of the Republican debates.

The NAU gets all the press, but for internationalists seeking a more integrated world, it is not the only game in town. Very quietly, behind the scenes, a little known NGO has been working to advance plans to merge the United States with Europe. No one has heard of the work of this group, the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN), because it has never been covered by the mainstream media. That is a particularly interesting fact, given that TPN’s supporters and collaborators include many powerful and well-known corporations, think tanks and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic. That they are cooperating in an effort to merge the U.S. and the EU would seem to be at least marginally newsworthy.

Even though the mainstream media can’t be bothered to report on real news in the midst of its “all celebrity, all the time” coverage, the American people might be interested to learn that TPN’s plans are not just talk. Working carefully, if quietly, since the early 1990s, the organization has moved quickly to gain the agreement of leaders on both sides of the ocean that further integration is necessary and desirable. Now, the organization is much closer to achieving its goals than anyone would suspect.

Merger Ahead
In February 2007, TPN published its white paper entitled, Completing the Transatlantic Market. In that paper, the organization summarized its goals. The executive summary states:

It is time for a complementary, top down approach to transatlantic cooperation through a joint commitment by the European Union and the United States to a roadmap for achieving a Transatlantic Market by 2015 and creation of an overarching framework for dialogue and action to achieve that goal.

The emphasis placed on “top down” is not insignificant. As typically used by NGOs, that terminology usually implies that executive level leaders will impose their desires on the citizens of a nation, not the other way around as envisioned, for instance, by America’s Founders.

That aside, is the plan, as described by the TPN white paper, really anything to worry about? After all, isn’t a common “Transatlantic Market” just a matter of economics and trade policy that will have little or no effect on the sovereignty and independence of nations?

The experience of Europe over the last 60 years demonstrates that the creation of a common market is only a first step toward more thorough integration. The European Union itself started life as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), an intergovernmental organization formed in the aftermath of World War II ostensibly to give a boost to the coal and steel industries in European nations ravaged by war.

But the ECSC was only meant to be a first step to further economic integration. In 1957 it was superseded by the European Economic Community (EEC) that was created by the Treaty of Rome. The EEC was the immediate predecessor of today’s European Union.

The progression from common market to political union as it occurred in Europe should not be mistaken for a singular and unusual event. It is, in fact, the process through which other international political mergers are expected to occur. The process was explained by University of Nevada professor of economics Glen Atkinson. In a paper published in the Social Science Journal entitled “Regional Integration in the Emerging Global Economy,” Professor Atkinson explained:

The lowest level of integration is a free trade area that involves only the removal of tariffs and quotas among the parties. If a common external tariff is added, then a customs union has been created. The next level, or a common market, requires free movement of people and capital as well as goods and services. It is this stage where institutional development becomes critical. The stage of economic union requires a high degree of coordination or even unification of policies. This sets the foundation for political union.

If TPN succeeds in catalyzing the existence of a transatlantic common market by 2015 as planned, that will be only one short step removed from actual political integration.

Integration Milestones
On its Website, TPN proudly lists some of its "achievements" in building the framework for a common market. “In a short space of time,” the organization says, it has “built a credible ‘network of networks’ linking the political, business and academic communities. It confirmed its value to members by helping to shape key developments in the EU-US partnership during the 1990s.”

According to the organization, some of its achievements include:

Creating the “New Transatlantic Agenda” in December 1995, described by TPN as “a blueprint for joint action by the US and the European Union across all of the most important political, economic, security and social aspects their relationship.”
Launching the “Transatlantic Business Dialogue” also in 1995 “with a specific objective to remove the trade and investment obstacles to the creation of a real transatlantic marketplace.
Creating the “Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP)” at the London EU-US Summit in May 1998. According to the organization, “TEP identified a series of elements for an initiative to intensify and extend multilateral and bilateral cooperation and common actions in the field of trade and investment, including formal trade negotiations and trust enhancing measures.”
These efforts have garnered significant transoceanic support, both from political and business leaders, for TPN’s plan. In 2004 and again in 2005, the EU parliament passed resolutions “in which the concept of completing the transatlantic market by 2015 is supported.” TPN notes with apparent satisfaction that the U.S. Congress has done likewise and points out that the “House of Representatives has also passed a resolution endorsing the concept of a ‘Transatlantic Partnership Agreement’ between the EU and the US.”

For those keeping track of Congressional malfeasance, this legislation, H. Res. 390, was introduced in the House by Nebraska Republican Doug Bereuter on October 2, 2003. It passed the House little more than a month later on November 5. The resolution found that the “United States and the European community are aware of their shared responsibility, not only to further transatlantic security, but to address other common interests such as environmental protection, poverty reduction, combatting international crime and promoting human rights, and to work together to meet those transnational challenges which affect the well-being of all.”

Moreover, it found that because of the “threats posed by global terrorism, terrorist states, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the nexus of the three, the partnership should be expanded progressively from a transatlantic community of values to an effective transatlantic community of action by developing a collaborative strategy and action plan for dealing with those challenges of mutual interest and concern.” (emphasis added.)

Support Network
The passage of the Bereuter resolution in the House in 2003 is a strong indication that the TPN plan has the widespread support of influential members of Congress. It is not necessary to look far to find just how many influential legislators have backed the transatlantic integration plan.

One such backer was the late Republican Congressman Henry Hyde, the powerful and influential former chairman of both the House Judiciary and International Relations Committees.

In its “Partnership Report” of June 2004, TPN notes that Hyde spoke in favor of creating an EU-US common market during a speech in Rome on June 29, 2003. According to the TPN report, Hyde “stressed the need for a ‘Transatlantic Economic Framework with the free movement of goods, services and investments….” That, as economist Glen Atkinson pointed out, is the very definition of a common market.

But Hyde wasn’t finished. He returned to this in a speech given in Chicago in September of 2003. In that speech, TPN points out, Hyde argued that America’s “economic relationship with Europe receives too little attention” and that the U.S. should be looking more closely at “the benefits to be obtained from closer cooperation across the Atlantic.” Accordingly, TPN notes, “Hyde called for the establishment of ‘a true Atlantic Marketplace’ and urged the EU and the US to ‘convene a high-level meeting of our respective regulatory policy-makers and regulatory bodies to try to establish common objectives in regulation and devise a process of formulating complementary regulations.” To put this in proper perspective, it should be noted that harmonization of law and regulation is a necessary prerequisite that must be accomplished before any economic or political integration of nations can occur. Finally, in 2004, Hyde, along with Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis and Minister of the European Parliament (MEP) Jim Nicholson, who was serving as Chairman of the European Parliamentary Delegation to the US, signed a joint statement “calling for a barrier-free transatlantic market by 2015,” thereby officially endorsing the plan preferred by TPN.

There are many other important legislators on both sides of the Atlantic that continue to back the integration plan, and some of them actually serve as leaders within TPN itself. The most prominent of these is Republican Senator Robert Bennett of Utah. Bennett is chairman of the TPN Management Committee, one of the top leadership positions at TPN, according to the organization’s Website. The Honorary U.S. President of TPN is Robert S. Strauss, a key Carter administration official and former ambassador to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Joining Strauss and Bennett in TPN leadership positions are:

Former Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) — now Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US, another group promoting U.S.-EU integration;
Democratic Congressman Ron Kind of Wisconsin who has been an active supporter in Congress of regional free trade agreements;
Former Congressman Mike Oxley (R-Ohio), infamous co-author of the notorious Sarbanes-Oxley Act that, as described by Congressman Ron Paul, unconstitutionally gave “the federal government authority to regulate the accounting standards of private corporations” in the wake of the Enron and other financial scandals of the early part of the decade.
In addition to these U.S. legislators serving in leadership positions with TPN, there are many others who are members of TPN’s “U.S. Congressional Group.” These include six Senators — the aforementioned Senator Bennett of Utah, Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) – and 49 Representatives. Some of the noteworthy members of the latter cohort include former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), current Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos (D-California), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee John Dingell (D-Michigan), and current House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). It seems that selling out U.S. sovereignty is a very popular and bi-partisan pastime.

The Usual Suspects
Among businesses and think tanks one finds the usual crowd of internationalists heading up the lists of those supporting the TPN program of transatlantic integration. European and American business members include such influential companies as Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Coca Cola, IBM, Time Warner, Walt Disney, Walmart, Xerox, Merck, Nestle, UPS and a host of others. The inclusion of media titans Time Warner (owner of CNN) and Disney (owner of ABC News) perhaps explains in part the media blackout on the coverage of TPN’s activities.

Among think tanks, the TPN membership list is a who’s who of internationalism-promoting groups. Included on the list is the granddaddy of them all, the Council on Foreign Relations. Joining the CFR is the Atlantic Council of the United States which seeks a “healthy transatlantic relationship” as “an essential prerequisite for a stronger international system.” Other organizations serving as TPN members include:

The Brookings Institution
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The Chamber of Commerce of the United States
The German Marshall Fund of the U.S.
The Centre for European Policy Studies
The European Roundtable of Industrialists
Institut Francais des Relations Internationales
All of these and several other groups have lent their support to the TPN goal of creating a Transatlantic Market by 2015. As umbrella organization TPN points out, this market is to be created by executive decree from the top down, and that is exactly what has been happening. Meanwhile, the citizens who are being herded into this arrangement have no say in the matter. In fact, they are being kept in the dark.

Oh Yea ! What do we have here now.

2007-12-20T23:08:00.000-08:00

The Rise of the World's Most
Powerful Mercenary Army

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill joins us to talk about his new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Scahill writes, "Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the 'global war on terror,' with its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 private contractors at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments." From Iraq to New Orleans, Blackwater has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy.

Four years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq was in its opening hours. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries later, another date marked later this month has taken on nearly as much significance. March 31st, 2004. Four employees of the private U.S. security firm Blackwater USA are ambushed as they drive through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses are dragged through the streets. Two of them are strung up from a bridge. This is an excerpt of the PBS documentary, "Private Warriors", going back to that day.

* "Private Warriors" - excerpt of PBS documentary.

The U.S. military followed with the first of two major attacks that ended up virtually destroying Fallujah -- and setting off a new wave of Iraqi resistance that continues to this day. Meanwhile, instead of curbing the reliance on contractors in Iraq, the Bush administration has expanded the privatization of war. Blackwater has been one of the biggest recipients. From Iraq to New Orleans, it has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy.

Today, an in-depth look at Blackwater with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. He"s just come out with his first book: "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Jeremy is a Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He joins us in the firehouse studio.

* Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of the new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
More information at Blackwaterbook.com

AMY GOODMAN: Four years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq was in its opening hours. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries later, another date marked later this month has taken on nearly as much significance. It was March 31, 2004. Four employees of the private US security firm Blackwater USA were ambushed as they drive through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses were dragged through the streets. Two of them were strung up from a bridge. This is an excerpt of the PBS documentary, Private Warriors, going back to that day.

NARRATOR: Contractually, Blackwater was to supply two SUVs with three guards per vehicle. Instead, the men set out at 8:30 in the morning with just two men per car, each short a rear gunner. They were escorting three empty trucks on their way to pick up some kitchen equipment at a base west of Fallujah. They were vulnerable and obvious. The commander responsible for Fallujah was Marine Colonel John Toolan.

COL. JOHN TOOLAN: Contractors were easily identified on the roads, because they were all in brand new SUVs, 2004 SUV, tinted windows, so they were easy to pick out. And the insurgents knew that it was a fairly easy mark.

NARRATOR: Around 9:30 a.m., they approached the center of town. Insurgents would ambush them from behind. All four guards were shot and killed. The insurgents made their own video of the aftermath.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The first thing that came up was the camera bouncing toward this SUV, and it went right into the car. It was -- I knew it was him from his looks, everything, clear as day. You know, at least I know he wasn't burned alive. He was dead.

NARRATOR: By the time the press arrived, a mob had set the cars on fire.

COL. JOHN TOOLAN: Unfortunately, it was going out on CNN, and we knew that this was a key component of the insurgents' strategy: get the pictures out, make it look like they're winning. It was clear.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the Frontline documentary, Private Warriors. The US military followed with the first of two major attacks that ended up virtually destroying Fallujah and setting off a new wave of Iraqi resistance that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, instead of curbing the reliance on contractors in Iraq, the Bush administration has expanded the privatization of war. Blackwater has been one of the biggest recipients. From Iraq to New Orleans, it's continued to pull in multimillion-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near secrecy. Today, an in-depth look at Blackwater with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. He has just come out with his first book, its title, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Jeremy will join us after this break.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent and Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. His first book is now out. It is called Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Welcome back.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: We just saw this excerpt of what happened in Fallujah, the end of March 2004. Describe what happened and why you took this on and expanded it into a book.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I first went to Iraq as a reporter for Democracy Now! in late 1998, when the Clinton administration was gearing up to bomb Iraq, and, in fact, Clinton did hammer Iraq for four days in December of 1998. And it was the first of what would be many trips that I would take to Iraq from 1998 until 2003, when the US occupation began. And I spent a fair bit of time going in and out of Fallujah, among the cities that I visited in Iraq.

In fact, in the summer of 2002, I camped out in the desert right near Fallujah and walked through the center of the city. And my recollection of conversations with people in Fallujah was always of a massacre. But this was before the Iraq war had officially begun in 2003. During the 1991 Gulf War, Allied war planes bombed a crowded marketplace and hit a residential complex and killed some seventy-eight people in Fallujah. And so, I always thought of that as the Fallujah massacre.

And you have to understand that when the US troops first rolled into Baghdad, Fallujans sort of organized themselves and sort of were taking stock of these earth-moving events that had happened in the country when the occupation began. And so, when US troops came to the outskirts of Fallujah in April of 2003, Fallujans essentially told the US military, "We're fine. We don't need you here." And there was some back-and-forthing going on with local officials, and Fallujans were really trying to organize their lives and have their kids going to school. And this was happening around Iraq. Despite the fact that there was an occupation underway, people were still trying to live somewhat normal lives.

And eventually the US came in and took Fallujah by force. They, in fact, took over a primary school called the Leader's School in April of 2003, and Iraqis began protesting, and that resulted in what Fallujans remember as a massacre. About a dozen people were killed, seventy people were injured one night as Fallujans protested. And that really sparked a series of conflicts between the people of Fallujah and the US military, in which scores of US soldiers were killed and many Fallujans were killed.

And then another event happened before the Fallujah ambush of the Blackwater contractors. On March 22, the Israeli military killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was a cleric bound in a wheelchair, as he was coming out of morning prayers, killed him and about a half a dozen people in his entourage. And in Fallujah, there was a massive protest against that. And already people believed that the Israelis and the US were working hand-in-hand during the occupation of Iraq. So that was the context leading up to the Fallujah ambush, and it's almost never talked about.

So the people of Fallujah -- I think, rightly -- were very outraged at their treatment at the hands of the US and its allies and saw this sort of relationship between the US and Israel as one of conquest in the Middle East and certainly in Iraq. In fact, many people in Iraq believed that private military contractors, like Blackwater, were either CIA or Mossad. So it's very likely that when those guys rolled into Fallujah that morning, that people thought they were attacking a CIA convoy or a Mossad convoy.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, four -- I was about to say soldiers, but they weren't -- four people, military contractors, were killed, brutally dragged through the streets of Fallujah and then hung up. Tell us who they were.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, these guys were all Special Forces veterans. Scott Helvenston was one of the youngest people ever to serve in the US Navy Seals. He became a US Navy Seal trainer and served in the Navy Seals for twelve years and was a world-class athlete. He won, I think, a gold medal and several other medals at international competitions. Jerry Zovko also had served in the US Special Forces. Mike Teague was a veteran of several US wars, including Afghanistan, and was a highly decorated soldier. And Wes Batalona was a US Army Ranger who had served in Somalia. So these guys were all Special Forces veterans. They all considered themselves to be patriotic Americans.

And, you know, I've gotten to know their families very well over these years. All of them believed that their loved ones were doing what they had always done, serving their country. And the fact that they were working for Blackwater was no different than serving in the Navy Seals. They all that thought their loved ones were going over there to protect Paul Bremer, because that's what Blackwater was doing in Iraq at the time. I don't think any of their families knew that their loved ones would end up dying for empty flatbed trucks going to pick up kitchen equipment.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, they've sued.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And so, after those guys were killed, I don't think any of the families immediately assumed any malice on the part of Blackwater, and they, I think, did what anyone would do. They started calling the company and saying, "What happened? What were they doing in Fallujah? Why were they escorting these trucks? Why were there only two men in each vehicle that day? Why weren't the vehicles armored?" And instead of getting answers, the families say that they got the runaround from Blackwater.

And so, Blackwater flies these families out in October of 2004, several months after the ambush happened, and while they're at the Blackwater compound in Moyock, North Carolina, the families say they felt like they were being monitored, that Blackwater officials were attempting to not have them speak about the incident. And, really, they got the impression that Blackwater didn't want them to really be talking to each other. And the event was billed sort of as a memorial for their loved ones, and there were some other people whose loved ones had died in Iraq, but also a moment for the families to ask questions of what happened.

And so, Donna Zovko, Jerry Zovko's mother, and her son and her husband were in a meeting with Blackwater executives, and she says that she asked to see the incident report on the ambush and to have her son's belongings returned to her. And she said that a Blackwater representative stood up from the table and said that "that's a classified document, and you'll have to sue us to get it." And so, the families got to know each other in the ensuing months, and Katy Helvenston, Scott Helvenston's mother, and Donna Zovko really sort of spearheaded it. And in January of 2005, those four families filed a groundbreaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater, saying that the company had defrauded their loved ones by not providing them with their contractually obligated safeguards for their mission that day. And, yes, the men signed contracts saying that they would not hold Blackwater accountable if they died or were injured. But the families say that the contracts became null and void the moment that Blackwater sent them on that mission unprepared.

AMY GOODMAN: That's one of the suits against this company, Blackwater. Talk about this company, who founded it, how large it is.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater was founded -- it was actually incorporated in late 1996 and really started to build up its operations in 1997. Originally, it was a 5,000-acre plot near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, and the personal private fortune of its founder, Erik Prince. He's believed to be, if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest people ever to serve in the elite US Navy Seals.

Maybe we should talk for a moment about who he is and his background, because it has everything to do with the success of the company. Erik Prince comes from a very wealthy rightwing Christian dynasty in the town of Holland, Michigan. His father was a man named Edgar Prince, who was a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalist. He built up an empire called the Prince Manufacturing Corp., and they manufactured auto parts, serviced the auto industry. And, in fact, what the company is perhaps best known for was for creating the now-ubiquitous lighted sun visor. So when you pull down the visor in your car and it lights up, that's the Prince family's invention. And it was a very profitable business.

And so, young Erik Prince grew up in this very heady atmosphere that mixed the sort of free-market gospel with the literal Christian gospel. His family, they were strict Calvinists. And Erik Prince was political at a very early age and watched as his father used his company as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of what we now know as the religious right in this country, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994. His father gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Young Erik Prince was in the first crop of interns to serve at the Family Research Council. They gave significant funding to James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family, which is now sort of the premier evangelical organizing network in this country, the "prayer warriors."

And what's interesting is that Erik Prince's sister Betsy married into another powerhouse Michigan family, perhaps the single greatest bankroller of the Republican Revolution: Dick DeVos's Amway Corporation. Erik Prince's sister married Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway fortune. And Amway was a company that sold home services products and sort of was accused of running the operation like a cult and using their marketers to not only sell their products, but to sell their political agenda, the rise of the sort of Christian right and Republican Revolution. And so, this marriage of these two families was sort of typical of the merging of the monarchist families in old Europe.

And so, Erik Prince grew up in this atmosphere, where his family was a real power player in what would become the Republican Revolution of 1994. Erik Prince interned in George H.W. Bush's White House, but he complained that it wasn't conservative enough for him on gay issues, on the balanced budget, on the environment. He also was an intern for the conservative California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a man who, after leaving Reagan's staff as an advisor and speechwriter, went over to join the Mujahideen in Afghanistan before beginning his congressional term. And so, Erik Prince --

AMY GOODMAN: To fight the Soviets.

JEREMY SCAHILL: To fight the Soviets, and he -- you know, he bragged of having gone over there to stand alongside the freedom fighters, those very freedom fighters now being the ones who have declared war on the Bush administration and, you know, that the Bush administration claims to be at the center of the so-called war on terror. So those were the early days of young Erik Prince.

And then he went on to join the US Navy Seals. And I don't think he wanted to leave the Navy Seals, but his father died in 1995, and his wife had cancer, and it became no longer an option to be a Navy Seal. Prince had been in Bosnia. He had been in Haiti. He had served in the Mediterranean. And so, he sort of came home in the mid-'90s to help the family sort through its affairs and to also take care of his ailing wife.

And the family ended up, after much deliberation, selling Prince Manufacturing for a little less than $1.5 billion in cash, and Erik Prince took his political experience, his religious commitment and the experience he gained from watching his father become a major operator in politics and business, and opened Blackwater. And he teamed up with several other former Special Forces guys, and Blackwater was founded on the principle of anticipating accelerated government outsourcing of training and firearms-related training, and so that's how Blackwater began. It was supposed to be like a sportsman's paradise/training center in the wilderness of North Carolina.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book about talking about a speech of Donald Rumsfeld's the day before the September 11 attacks.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary, and gathered before him was the gaggle of corporate executives that had been tapped by the Bush administration to make up the senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon. There was a sort of mixture of people at the Pentagon. On the one hand, you had people from corporate America, from all the defense and weapons manufacturers that were brought in, and then you also had the neoconservative ideologues, people like Paul Wolfowitz. And so, Rumsfeld gives a speech in which he literally declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. And he said, "I've come not to destroy the Pentagon, but to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

And then literally the next day the Pentagon would be attacked. But the vision that Rumsfeld sort of laid out that day would become known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine, where you use high technology, small footprint forces and an increased and accelerated use of private contractors in fighting the wars. It also, at the center of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, became regime change in central strategic nations. Rumsfeld and Cheney both had been signers of the Project for a New American Century, that envisioned a new Pearl Harbor as accelerating the agenda, the neoconservative agenda. And, indeed, the day after Rumsfeld laid out that plan, the Pentagon was attacked, and all of a sudden the world became a blank canvas on which Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush could sort of paint their vision.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, you devote a whole chapter to another official within Blackwater, Cofer Black.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, Blackwater is really stacked to the deck. The deck is really stacked in Blackwater's favor. In the times that we live in right now, they have several former senior officials from the Bush administration, not from like the Reagan administration, but from the current Bush administration.

Among the most prominent, perhaps the biggest power player in Blackwater's arsenal, is J. Cofer Black, who is a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, began his career in the 1970s in Africa, as the US -- well, some would say supported the apartheid regime, others would say did nothing to stop it. So Cofer Black was one of the key CIA people in Africa throughout the '70s and '80s. And he arrived in Sudan in the early 1990s, and he came under diplomatic cover. As a sort of diplomat, he was there, but he actually was CIA.

And as Black was there, a young Saudi billionaire named Osama bin Laden was building up his international network. And by the time Black would leave Sudan a few years later, the CIA would refer to it as the Ford Foundation of Islamic terrorism. And so, Cofer Black and Osama bin Laden are both operating simultaneously in Khartoum in Sudan in the 1990s. And at one point, there was a plot to kill Cofer Black once bin Laden's group had learned that he was actually CIA. And so, they were sort of monitoring each other. And one of Black's operatives in Sudan actually cooked up a plot to kill bin Laden and toss his body over the fence at the Iranian embassy to make it seem like the Iranians had killed bin Laden. But at the time, bin Laden wasn't considered a big fish. The big fish in Sudan was Carlos the Jackal, the famed international terrorist. And so, Cofer Black's claim to fame in the 1990s had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, but had to do with the fact that he was seen as the man who caught Carlos the Jackal.

And Black would go on then to serve in Latin America, and just before 9/11 he was tapped to head up the CIA's counterterrorism center. And so when the 9/11 attacks happened, Cofer Black was called to the Situation Room in the White House on September 13, 2001, to lay out for President Bush the CIA plan to go after bin Laden. And he was said to be throwing papers on the ground as he described how they were going to insert Special Forces into Afghanistan. And he told President Bush that he would bring back Osama bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. And, in fact, those were the orders he gave to his CIA operatives that went in with the Jawbreaker team into Afghanistan after 9/11. And one of them said to Cofer Black, you know, "I don't know what we're going to do about dry ice in the field, but we certainly can get a cardboard box."

Cofer Black became known in the administration as the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy, because he would talk in these sort of messianic terms about the mission that they were about to undertake and said, "When we're through with them, they'll have flies crawling across their eyeballs." He told Russian diplomats, "We're going to stick their heads on pikes in the field." So this is now the guy who went on after 9/11 to really accelerate the use of extraordinary renditions, the capturing of people, putting hoods on them, putting diapers on them, sending them on these long flights to third countries where they're asked a series of questions provided by US interrogators and where they're tortured and humiliated and broken down -- people like Maher Arar, who you've covered extensively on this show.

AMY GOODMAN: Cofer Black is now part of a new Blackwater effort, a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This is really the next sort of generation of privatization, is the privatization of intelligence. And they're marketing their services to Fortune 500 companies. And so, it's not just Cofer Black. It's another CIA guy who went on to work at Blackwater, Robert Richer, who was a Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA. So those two are really the sort of leaders behind this new initiative.

But, really, the man behind all of it is Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater. He's rapidly buying up, for instance, a think tank, the Terrorism Research Center, and other intelligence entities and sort of cobbling them together. Blackwater's big push now is not just for government contracts, but it's also for corporate contracts. And so, it's part of this radical privatization agenda. And to have a man heading this who told Congress openly, "There was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off" -- this is a guy who ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private intelligence company.

Blackwater has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, many of them sort of fit the patterns of planes used in extraordinary rendition. Now, we don't have any direct evidence to suggest that Blackwater's planes have been used in extraordinary renditions, but the types of planes that they have and the flight patterns that they engage in are very similar to some that have been documented to be engaged in extraordinary rendition. So this raises a lot of serious questions about the extent of Blackwater's involvement.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from break, I want to ask you under whose laws do they operate, these, what you call, mercenaries, Blackwater. We're talking to Jeremy Scahill. He is author of the new book, Blackwater. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jeremy Scahill. He is a Democracy Now! correspondent. He's the Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. And he has written his first book. It's called Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Jeremy, as we speak, it's number two on the Amazon list for nonfiction bestsellers. This seems to be a problem, well, perhaps for Blackwater, who -- well, you have a website called blackwaterbook.com?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What's happened with your website?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I actually got a letter from Blackwater's -- one of Blackwater's many lawyers. They have an army of lawyers. Their counsel of record is Ken Starr, the man who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton. And their previous lawyer was Fred Fielding, who now is President Bush's White House counsel, defending him against the attorney purge scandal. So they have powerhouse law firms, many law firms working for them. We got a letter from their law firm saying that they respect my First Amendment rights to criticize Blackwater, but take down your website. And they said that I'm violating the Lanham Act, which has to do with like corporate competition and trademark. And, I mean, this is intimidation tactics. And we're not going to back down. The website is going to remain up.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's talk about the lawsuits against Blackwater. One is the lawsuit around the men who died in Fallujah, their families have brought it. Another one is for Afghanistan; what happened?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This stems from a plane crash that happened in Afghanistan in November of 2004. I mean, this really sort of tells the story of the reach of Blackwater. Blackwater -- I was talking about its aviation division before. Blackwater has a contract in Afghanistan to provide a sort of ferry service for the US military, where Blackwater aircraft take personnel, in some cases active-duty US troops, from point A to point B inside of Afghanistan. They also transport supplies and equipment and other things.

And so, in November of 2004, Blackwater was operating an aircraft taking a number of US troops from one point to another. They were riding through a mountain range, and we were able to get the cockpit data recording transcripts, and the pilots sort of appeared to be messing around, saying, you know, "You're an x-wing fighter man, Star Wars," and they were kind of joking with each other. And the plane ends up crashing into the side of the mountain. And what's different from Fallujah is that in this case active-duty US soldiers were killed, one of them being a fairly senior military official. And so, the families, not of the Blackwater contractors, but of the soldiers, are suing Blackwater. And this could also be a precedent-setting case.

Now, Blackwater has argued in its legal briefings that it can't be sued in civilian courts and that it's entitled to the same immunity enjoyed by the military from civilian litigation inside of the United States. And the reason that Blackwater says this, or among the top reasons, is that Donald Rumsfeld in February of 2006 classified contractors as an official part of the US total force, making up an effective part of the US war machine. So Blackwater has turned around and taken Rumsfeld's designation of their company as an official part of the US total force and said, "This means we're part of the US military, and you can't sue us." At the same time, Blackwater, since 2004, has been lobbying against having its forces placed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, commonly known as the court-martial system. So Blackwater is essentially saying, "We're above the law. We can't be prosecuted in military courts. We can't be sued in civilian courts."

AMY GOODMAN: And what are the laws that congress members and senators are trying to pass now?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, it's interesting, because one of the reasons, I think, that the Bush administration uses companies like Blackwater is it provides an extraordinary amount of political cover. We know that at least 780 contractors have been killed in Iraq. I think the number is actually probably much higher, but those are people whose families have applied for death benefits under the federal insurance program provided to contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: Which would mean, by the way, that we're talking about more than 4,000 Americans who have died in Iraq.

JEREMY SCAHILL: There are 4,000, yes, people who are -- well, not all of those 780 are actually Americans, but they're working for American companies or on behalf of the occupation. But, again, these are only people who are eligible for federal death benefits in the United States. Over 7,600 of them have been injured in Iraq. There are 100,000 private contractors in Iraq. We know from the Government Accountability Office that there are 48,000 employees of private military firms, mercenary companies operating in Iraq. 180 separate firms are registered operating in Iraq, Blackwater sort of being the industry leader. And they operate in a climate of total impunity. There is no effective law that governs these mercenary forces in Iraq.

Technically, the law of the land is something called the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- it's a mouthful -- that was passed in 2000, that said that anyone, any contractor working for or accompanying the armed forces could be subjected to prosecution under US law for crimes committed on the battlefield. Now, one of the major flaws of that -- I mean, there's a much bigger flaw, which I'll explain in a second -- one of the major flaws of that is that Blackwater, for instance, isn't working for the military. It has a State Department contract in Iraq. So it's not technically working under the Department of Defense. So it could argue it's not really subjected to that law. Blackwater has been paid since June of 2004 $750 million by the State Department alone. That's just one of Blackwater's contracts.

And so, what's happening right now is that Representative David Price, who happens to be from Blackwater's home state of North Carolina -- he's a Democrat -- is putting forth legislation to expand that act, that I referred to before, to include all contractors, so it technically would cover Blackwater.

But the bigger problem is not how good it looks on paper. The bigger problem is -- you have 100,000 private forces operating in Iraq right now -- who is going to go do the investigations? Because according to this law, it would be US prosecutors. So a US prosecutor would go from Virginia over to Baquba? And who's going to protect them? And who's going to interview the Iraqi victims? And how would any of this work? And when I put that question to Representative David Price, he said, "Well, that's a good question. I didn't say it was a simple matter." But the fact is that the mercenary industry is endorsing this legislation because it is not enforceable. And so, it looks great on paper. The mercenaries can go in front of Congress and say, "Well, there's this law. We can be prosecuted." But the fact is only one person has been indicted, one contractor has been indicted, in these years of occupation in Iraq, and he wasn't even an armed military contractor.

AMY GOODMAN: And other laws that that congress members and senators are trying to put forward?

JEREMY SCAHILL: A very interesting thing happened late last year. The conservative South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, himself a former JAG officer in the Air Force and currently a reservist lawyer for the Air Force, slipped in language to the 2007 defense authorization that President Bush signed into law that said that contractors will be placed under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. They went bonkers with this. And it's actually one instance where --

AMY GOODMAN: This was passed.

JEREMY SCAHILL: It was passed. Bush signed it into law. So now, Barack Obama, for instance, put forth this sweeping legislation that also seeks to expand that domestic prosecution of contractors on the battlefield, but also calls for the Pentagon to clarify how it's going to implement Lindsey Graham's change, because the law of the land right now actually is that contractors could be put in the court-martial system. And I think that we're going to see serious constitutional challenges. This is going to play out for years and years. I mean, contractors are here to stay. I mean, they are not going anywhere. And they're only going to be on the rise with the surge and the British pulling out, you know, some of its troops.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, who is Blackwater's man in Latin America?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater's man in Latin -- well, he's no longer their man in Latin America, but the man who has been working for Blackwater in Latin America is a guy named Jose Miguel Pizarro, and he's a dual citizen of the US and Chile. And I actually got him to go on record with me and interviewed him for several hours. And Mr. Pizarro grew up in Pinochet's Chile with dreams of serving in the Chilean military. And he's a major defender of Augusto Pinochet and a defender of Pinochet's record and says he lived in the military government for seventeen years and didn't see any dictatorship and, you know, goes on and on. And I explain it in detail in the book how much of a fan he is of Pinochet.

So he did fulfill his dreams. He served in the Chilean military and got to know -- because he was bilingual and also was a citizen of the US -- got to know people from the US military and really admired them and looked up to them. And so, he left the Chilean military, joined the US military and worked as a translator for US Southern Command. And he traveled all around Latin America and met all of these military officials.

And then he, in 1999, offered his services to General Dynamics, essentially marketing General Dynamics military products to Latin American governments. And he became so successful at it that in 2001 he left General Dynamics and started his own consulting firm and went around and introduced himself to all of the military attaches of Latin American nations and began selling them what he called "business intelligence." He says, "I wasn't an arms dealer." And so, what Pizarro would do is he would go to the military attaches of almost every Latin American nation and say, "I can put you in touch with people that can service your military with new equipment and weapons, etc." So he was going around and sort of was the middle man between US weapons manufacturers and Latin American governments. And he built up a very successful operation.

When the Iraq war began in 2003, Pizarro was hired on by CNN en Espanol to be a commentator on the war, and he struck up a friendship with Wesley Clark, and he said that he would go down into the cafeteria -- both he and Clark were based in Atlanta -- and if he didn't know what to say about a particular question, he would ask Wesley Clark, "What should I say about this?" And General Clark would say, "Well, Jose, let me tell you," and then he would just say exactly in Spanish what Clark had told him in English. And so, Pizarro was working, still doing his military consultancy.

He met a Blackwater representative, who he described as an attractive woman, at a trade show in 2003. And he approached them. He had never really heard of Blackwater. And his initial idea was that he wanted to help Blackwater market their target systems in Latin America, as he had been doing for all of these other companies. And so, he ended up going to the Blackwater compound, and he said it was like walking onto a movie set, a private military base. He was absolutely blown away by the 7,000-acre property in Moyock, North Carolina. And, you know, he talked about it in these terms like a kid seeing his first movie on the big screen.

And so he immediately got this vision that "I'm not going to market their target systems. I want to get them some Chile troops." And so, he began lobbying Blackwater officials, and saying, you know, Chileans are really well trained, and, you know, there was the US system, and we have great special forces. And, of course, he's talking about the military built up with US support in Pinochet's Chile, you know, this murderous regime, this brutal regime in Chile. And so, Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, Pizarro says, was not at all on board with it. And it took weeks and months of sort of building toward a real proposal.

Pizarro gets a meeting with Erik Prince and goes in and says, "You know, Mr. Prince, I'd like five minutes of your time." Prince, he says, told him, "You've got three minutes." It turns out, according to Pizarro, that Erik Prince had served with the Navy Seals in Chile and had this great respect for the Chilean forces. So he essentially says to Pizarro, "If you can get me just one Navy Seal from Chile, it's worth it for me. So go ahead, and you go down there, and you put your guys together. And give me a call when you're ready."

Pizarro goes down to Chile, begins talking to people, former military people, etc. He puts an ad in the paper, is inundated with applications from former special forces Chilean forces. And they set up a camp, where they begin evaluating. He says, "We weren't training. We were evaluating soldiers." And they used dummy rifles, etc., in rural Chile.

And to make a long story short, Blackwater sends evaluators down. Three evaluators come down in November of 2003 to Chile, and they look over Pizarro's forces. And eventually in February of 2004, Pizarro is up in Moyock, North Carolina, with his first batch of Chileans. And he says that he provided some 750 Chilean forces to Blackwater and other private military firms operating in Iraq. Those were the first international forces Blackwater admits to using. Gary Jackson, the guy who originally opposed it, was quoted then, after his Chileans arrived in Iraq, as saying, "We scoured the ends of the earth for professionals, and the Chileans fit well within the Blackwater system."

AMY GOODMAN: Other internationals who are now employed by Blackwater?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, there was a big scandal several months ago. Blackwater had hired up Colombian forces, but they were only paying them $34 a day. And so, the Colombians that Blackwater had hired and brought over to Iraq staged a strike of sorts at the Blackwater compound and demanded to be paid what everyone else was being paid.

AMY GOODMAN: And you're also writing about Blackwater actually being in charge of US troops. We only have a minute to go, but talk about Najaf.

JEREMY SCAHILL: One of the most disturbing incidents that happened in Iraq with mercenaries was on April 4, 2004. 4/4/04. Muqtada al-Sadr's forces from the Mahdi Army were in an uprising, because Paul Bremer had ordered the arrest of one of his top deputies, and there was a massive protest that hit the city of Najaf. Blackwater was guarding the occupation office there. They also had some Salvadoran troops, part of the Coalition of the Willing, as well as some active-duty US Marines.

And one of those Marines, Corporal Lonnie Young -- I got the official Marine account of that day. As the protest was happening, Lonnie Young, this active-duty Marine, has his weapon aimed into the crowd at a guy he says was carrying an AK-47. And he's thinking to himself, you know, "I need to ask for orders to open fire," but there were no commanding officers on scene. So he asked permission from Blackwater to open fire. And he said, "Sir, I've acquired a target with your permission." And he says Blackwater gave the order.

So Blackwater took active command of an active-duty US Marine in a battle that Muqtada al-Sadr's forces recall as a massacre on April 4, 2004. Blackwater guys refer to it as their Alamo. It's unclear how many people were killed that day, but they were firing off so many rounds, the Blackwater guys and this Marine, that they had to stop every fifteen minutes to let their weapons cool. Lonnie Young, that Marine, says hundreds of people were killed that day. The US government would say that there were about twenty to thirty.

AMY GOODMAN: Back home, New Orleans.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater showed up in New Orleans without a contract right after Hurricane Katrina hit, beat most federal agencies to the hurricane zone, within days was hired up by the Department of Homeland Security. Blackwater paid its men, they told me, $350 a day. They billed the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater man. At one point, they had 600 men stretched from Texas all the way to Mississippi through the Gulf. Blackwater was raking in sometimes $240,000 a day.

In an act of extraordinary cynicism, Blackwater in November of 2005 held a fundraiser, a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. Paul Bremer was the keynote speaker, and they pulled in $138,000 and gave it to the Red Cross. I didn't see the Red Cross at all when I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the point is they gave $138,000, but they were pulling in $240,000 a day.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have to leave it there, but I want to ask if you can come back tomorrow and also join Naomi Klein, who will be joining us. Tomorrow night, you and Naomi Klein will be having a discussion -- I'll be moderating it -- at the Ethical Culture Society here in New York, about Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the name of your first book. And congratulations on this investigative masterpiece. We will talk tomorrow about New Orleans, about Blackwater expanding on the home front, and we'll go abroad to the Caspian Sea. What are their plans for the Caspian Basin?
Part II - Blackwater:
The Rise of the World's
Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

We turn to the second part of our discussion with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Scahill discusses Blackwater's role in the Caspian Sea region in Central Asia and the battle in Congress over accountability for private contractors.

We turn to the second part of our discussion with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill [Click for Part I]. He is the author of the new book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." On yesterday's broadcast, we talked about how new lawsuits and congressional efforts are challenging Blackwater's role as the Bush administration's leading private security force, from Iraq to Afghanistan to New Orleans.

* Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of the new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
More information at Blackwaterbook.com

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the second part of our discussion with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, his first, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. On yesterday's broadcast, we talked about how new lawsuits and congressional efforts are challenging Blackwater's role as the Bush administration's leading private security force, from Iraq to Afghanistan to New Orleans.

Jeremy Scahill is a Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. Jeremy, before we go to the Caspian Sea area, we talked yesterday about Iraq, about Afghanistan, about the fact that Blackwater is being sued for situations in both cases. Just briefly summarize again for viewers and listeners who didn't catch yesterday's show what Blackwater is.

JEREMY SCAHILL: A decade ago this company didn't exist. It was little more than a 5,000-acre plot in North Carolina near the Great Dismal Swamp and the private fortune of its rightwing Christian bankroller-of-the-President founder, Erik Prince, whose family had a long history of backing Republican Revolution causes and the rise of the religious right. The company was started officially in '96, began building up in '97 as a sort of training facility for the federal forces, local and state law enforcement, as well as the military.

After 9/11, it became an all-out mercenary outfit and now has many, many government contracts. One of them alone with the State Department has generated $750 million for Blackwater since June of 2004. The company guards the senior US officials in Iraq, trains forces in Afghanistan, has been deployed in New Orleans. They have 2,300 men actively deployed around the world, another 20,000 contractors at the ready. It's really the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's global war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: And it employs Americans, as well as people -- yesterday we were talking about the Chileans under the Pinochet regime, those soldiers also included in this guard.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, the Bush administration failed to build an actual "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, and so they built up what some call the "coalition of the billing." And Blackwater and other mercenary companies, they're the only internationalizing that's going on with the occupation.

I document in the book one case where another mercenary company actually hired the exact Honduran troops that had been pulled out of Iraq by the Honduran government after John Negroponte was named as US ambassador. A mercenary company went into Honduras, hired up those troops and redeployed them in Iraq.

And in the case of Chile, this was a country -- 92% of the population in Chile was against the war. Chile was a rotating member of the Security Council and was against the occupation of Iraq. Blackwater and other firms went in and hired up Chilean commandos and other soldiers and sent them to Iraq in total contravention of the Chilean government's laws and in contravention of will of the Chilean people.

And this is a scenario we've seen replicated over and over with these companies. They recruit in countries that are against the war in Iraq, and they send their forces over there. And this is really not only a subversion of the domestic processes in these countries, but also a subversion of American democracy, because there is a necessary resistance to fighting these, you know, wars of aggression, offensive wars, and when you have a recruitment crisis in the military and you don't want to have a draft for political reasons, you just hire up soldiers from around the world and build your occupation force.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, what about the Caspian Sea? What does Blackwater have to do with this area? And geographically place it.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is an incredible story that dates back many decades. It was part of the great game between the US and the former Soviet Union. The Caspian Sea has one of the largest untapped resources of oil and natural gas in the world. The Clinton administration aggressively tried to begin tapping the resources of the Caspian Sea, but was unable to effectively do that.

When the Bush administration came to office -- well, let's just set this up. The Caspian Sea lies in Central Asia, and in addition to former Soviet republics, Iran also borders on the Caspian Sea, and so this is not only a game that the major powers of the world are playing about oil, but it has everything to do with a potential US attack against Iran. This is a very strategic region for the United States, particularly for the Bush administration right now.

And so, when the Bush administration took power a few years ago, the Cheney Energy Commission in 2001 did a study, and they found that there were 20 billion barrels of oil in the Caspian Sea, and its supplies rivaled that of the United States, slightly less than the United States. And so, the Bush administration put it on the fast track to try to open up a pipeline running from Azerbaijan, the port city of Baku, westward, and the resources of the Caspian were intended to go to Western European markets. Russia reacted in a very hostile way to US posturing in the region. And US officials, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, made several trips to the region, and he was there for the opening of this pipeline.

Well, a story that's gotten almost no attention is that, as the Bush administration began to tap the resources of the Caspian Sea, it realized that it needed to have security forces in the region, but they didn't want to have an overt US military presence, especially with the occupation of Iraq impending and the occupation of Afghanistan. So what they began doing was a program called Caspian Guard, where they started building up the military forces in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan. And this was a program that got very little media attention.

And so, beginning in July of 2004, the Bush administration sends Blackwater into the most strategic part of this operation, into the port city of Baku, which juts out from Azerbaijan's coast into the Caspian Sea. And Blackwater quietly went in there on a $2.5 million original contract, and they set up a ninety-man special forces unit of the Azerbaijani military, modeled after the US Navy Seals. So they were exporting training for the most elite forces in the US. Blackwater goes in, sets up what was called the ninety-man high-end Azeri unit, and they also build up from an old special forces base of the Soviet Union in Baku a command and control center that was modeled after the Department of Homeland Security's Command and Control Center.

When the Iranian government got wind that Blackwater was in the Caspian Sea and that it was engaged in these kinds of operations, it deployed its own special unit of the Iranian navy into the Caspian Sea as a direct response to Blackwater's presence there. And what this mission did was allow the Bush administration to send in loyalist forces from the private sector, have plausible deniability that there was an active US military presence and build up not only defense for the pipeline project, which is now open and flowing, but also some have suggested that it could be used, that facility that Blackwater built up, as one of several forward operating bases for a potential attack against Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, yesterday you talked about being in New Orleans after Katrina, seeing the Blackwater guards come in, being paid $350 by Blackwater, but Blackwater charging $950. What about other places in the United States, deploying here, like the border?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Blackwater really viewed New Orleans as an opportunity to begin a whole new division, and they started, after Hurricane Katrina, a domestic operations division. Blackwater representatives, a few months ago, met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about doing disaster response in the event of an earthquake. The company has simultaneously applied for operating licenses in all of the coastal states of the United States.

Their new training facility, they call it -- I call it a private military base -- is opening up now in Illinois. In fact, they just released yesterday their new training schedule, and there's grassroots resistance in Illinois happening to the opening of this private military base in Mount Carroll, Illinois, which is a few hours outside of Chicago. Blackwater is also struggling to open a new facility in San Diego -- near San Diego, California. Once again, local people are rising up and saying, "We don't want these men with heavy weapons coming into our community. We don't want the rattle of machinegun fire." So Blackwater really, I think, views the domestic feeding trough in the United States as a frontier to conquer.

Simultaneously, Blackwater also is manufacturing surveillance blimps that they're marketing to the Department of Homeland Security perhaps for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border. It's increasing its training of federal law enforcement and trying to get more contracts to train domestic forces inside of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Aero Contractors in North Carolina -- Blackwater is also based there. We just read a headline at the top of the show about grassroots activists demanding accountability. Aero Contractors, contracted by the CIA to transport prisoners to third world countries involved in extraordinary rendition. Is there a connection between Aero and Blackwater?

JEREMY SCAHILL: No. No, Blackwater has an aviation division -- not that I know of. Blackwater has an aviation division, and they have at least twenty aircraft. And one of the things that I did in the book was to look at the commonalities between the extraordinary rendition flights, the patterns of the aircraft that are engaged in extraordinary renditions, and Blackwater's aircraft. And several of Blackwater's aircraft, as I document in the book, fit the pattern, the flight patterns, of these flights that were engaged in extraordinary rendition.

Now, I have to say, I've tried to get all of Blackwater's contracts. Some of them are classified. In fact, Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, has said that some of their contracts are so secret that Blackwater can't tell one federal government entity what it's doing for the other. I think this is a story that really needs to be examined much more thoroughly. I think it's something that Congress should be investigating. The European Union, when it began to do its investigations, Blackwater's name popped up in their study. And this is something I'm going to continue to follow.

Just as a side to this, I find it interesting that Blackwater has this thriving aviation division and the vice chairman of the company is Cofer Black, the man who really kickstarted the widespread use of extraordinary renditions after 9/11, where prisoners are taken on the battlefield, zipped up -- or not on the battlefield, out of JFK Airport -- zipped up, a diaper placed on them, shackled and sent to a third country hell-hole to be tortured.

AMY GOODMAN: And this was Cofer Black in a previous position within the CIA?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes, he was the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, the man who told Congress that after 9/11 the gloves came off.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the vice chair now of Blackwater.

JEREMY SCAHILL: He's now the vice chair of Blackwater and one of the people behind this new intelligence company that Blackwater executives are at the core of. And they're marketing their services to private companies. This is one of the frightening new frontiers of private warfare.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, thanks very much for coming back. Tonight, we'll be together at the Ethical Culture Society in New York at 7:00, where Jeremy will be launching this first book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. We will be joined by Naomi Klein, Nation writer, as well. Jeremy, thank you. Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, author of Blackwater.
Copyright © 2007 - Democracy Now!, All Rights Reserved http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/20/1337226 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/21/1340210

Watch A Report About - BLACKWATER -

A Supertitious Religion In Modern Times: The New Age

2007-08-19T01:50:00.001-07:00

Bilderberg - an introduction

2007-08-16T09:11:00.001-07:00

Hell Is Real !!! (Part 1 of 3)

2007-08-02T19:05:00.001-07:00

Reptilian (BANNED VIDEO) ۞

2007-08-02T18:07:00.001-07:00

PBS- Dick Cheney wanted to attack Iraq right after 9/11

2007-07-30T14:26:00.001-07:00

Former CIA Official Exposes Bush Administration Fraud

2007-07-30T14:25:00.003-07:00

CRACK THE CIA

2007-07-30T14:25:00.001-07:00

GNN Report: CIA and drugs

2007-07-30T14:24:00.003-07:00

CIA Contributes To The Creation Of The Crack Epidemic

2007-07-30T14:24:00.001-07:00

Contra Coup - Coverup (from empowermentproject.org)

2007-07-30T14:23:00.001-07:00

The Efficiency of a Shadow Government

2007-07-30T14:22:00.005-07:00

The US Shadow Government

2007-07-30T14:22:00.003-07:00

Washington Post - Bush Announces Shadow Government Plans

2007-07-30T14:22:00.001-07:00

DeshCalling: THE CHT ACCORD AND THE DISEMPOWERING OF A NATION

2007-03-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

DeshCalling: THE CHT ACCORD AND THE DISEMPOWERING OF A NATION

Those who think for themselves

2007-01-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

Why do you suppose so many people believe that Democracy is the only way to world peace. Who's assumption is this anyway. World peace will never come through in balances of injustice. Just like everyone else who believes the rhetoric of democracy you will not be thinking for yourself you will be duped just like the rest of them. Democracy is not what every media mouth has said it is. Democracy is the opposite of socialism and just as socialism ends in chaos so will Democracy. Democracy removes the power of the people and puts it into the hands of those who where never elected who continually make new policies that will erode every last shred of your freedoms until there is nothing left. Do you believe that there is sovereignty for the people anyone out there that has studied politics should really know better but I guess its a lot to ask someone to think for themselves. We need new thinking thinking that has not been perverted by the rhetoric of mass media political campaigns.

Timeline to Global Governance

2007-01-29T13:05:00.000-08:00

Timeline to Global Governance

**** (Links followed by (M) available to members of the Environmental Conservation Organization)
1891 The Society of the Elect and the Association of Helpers - (also known as the "Secret Society,"), was created by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, William T. Stead, Reginald Baliol Brett, and Lord Esher, in London. Rhodes died in 1902, leaving the society, and his fortune, under the control of Milner, who established the Rhodes Scholar program. Good background here.
1910 The Round Table - a periodical, first published by Milner's "Secret Society" for Britain's intellectual community. The writers, and those associated with the publication became known as the Round Table Group, and later, the Chatham House crowd. Comprehensive background.
1912 Edward Mandell House - published Philip Dru: Administrator,a novel describing how the world could best be governed by a benevolent administrator. House traveled in Europe in 1909, and met Woodrow Wilson November 25, 1911. Chronology: Met Sir Edward Grey (member of Milner's group) in 1913.
1913 Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President - Edward Mandell House served as Wilson's campaign manager, and then as chief advisor. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy.Federal Reserve Act (M) enacted - creating the first "central bank" in America. Paul Warberg, whose family controlled the Reichsbank in Germany, was the architect of the system.
1914 World War I Begins - Wilson campaigned against U.S. entry into the war, then entered the war in 1917, one year before it ended.
1918 Wilson's 14 Points - presented to a joint session of Congress on January 8. The document was developed by Colonel Mandell House and advisors known as the "Inquiry."The League of Nations - first proposed in The Round Table, in December, in an article entitled The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion, written by Edward Mandell House and Lionel Curtis, a member of the original Rhodes/Milner "Secret Soceity."
1919 Paris Peace Conference - House is Wilson's chief deputy at the conference where he expanded his association with leaders of the Milner group.Genesis of the CFR and RIIA - At a meeting on May 30, at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, Edward M. House, Lionel Curtis, Lord Eustace Percy, Harold Temperley, Herbert Hoover, Christian Herter, James T. Shotwell (Columbia), Charles Seymore (Yale), Archibald C. Coolidge (Harvard), were among 50 individuals who decided to create the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S., and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.The Treaty of Versailles - signed June 28, ended the war and incorporated The Covenant of the League of Nations as the first 30 Articles - very much as had been proposed by House and Curtis.
1920 League of Nations rejected by U.S. Senate - despite herculean efforts on both sides of the Atlantic.Royal Institute of International Affairs - organized by the Milner group, housed at the Chatham House in London.
1921 Council on Foreign Relations - organized as U.S. counterpart to Royal Institute of International Affairs. John W. Davis, attorney to J.P. Morgan, was first president. Paul Warberg and J.D. Rockefeller were among initial funders. Began publishing Foreign Affairs in 1922. Described by Senator Barry Goldwater in 1979.
1925 Mein Kampf - published by Adolf Hitler.
1929 Stock Market Crash - Sets the stage for world wide depression, international response, and another war.
1930 Bank of International Settlements (M) - created in Basel, Switzerland. J.P. Morgan & Company, and others involved with the creation of the Federal Reserve, were among the founders.
1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt - begins his presidency amid the great depression. "The New Deal" was formulated by leftist, Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, and Secretary of State, Cordell Hulll, who, as a Senator, supported Wilson's League of Nations. Hull began drafting a United Nations Charter two weeks after Pearl Harbor.
1933 The Wilderness Society - founded by Bob Marshall, a socialist.
1936 National Wildlife Federation - founded.
1938 World marches toward war - A chronology of events leading to World War II, the event which gave rise to the United Nations.
1941 FDR delivers "Four Freedoms" speech - (January 6), and the Atlantic Conference (August 14), embody the idea of disarming sovereign nations under international authority.Declaration of War on Japan (December 8); Declaration of War on Germany (December 11).
1942 Declaration by "United Nations" - first official use of the name "United Nations," suggested by Roosevelt. Chronnology of related events.
1943 Moscow Conference - Articles 5 - 7 refer to "United Nations" and post-war permanent organization.United Nations Association - created by Eleanor Roosevelt.
1944 Bretton Woods Agreements - created the World Bank (M), and the International Monetary Fund (M). Henry Morganthau delivered the closing address. (Background and conference details.)Dumbarton Oaks Conversations - produce the draft recommendations for a United Nations organization. The U.S. Team, led by Edward Stettinius, included Alger Hiss, Ralph Bunche, Leo Pasvolsky, and Grayson Kirk. Overview of the meeting.
1945 Yalta Conference - (February) reached agreement on U.N. draft recommendations and set the date for U.N. conference. Germany surrenders (May 7).U.N. Charter - signed June 26, in San Francisco. Ratified by Senate (89-2) July 28.International Court of Justice - established in The Hague.August 6, & 9, atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Japan surrenders (August 14).UNESCO - created in London, November 16.
1946 U.S. joins UNESCO - Julian Huxley, president of the Eugenics Society, and author of "The New Divinity", first Director. Socialist Joseph Needham, appointed Director of Natural Science.World Health Organization created.
1947 World Federalist Association - founded in Asheville, North CarolinaWorld Federalist Movement - founded in Switzerland.
1948 IUCN Created - by Julian Huxley, in Geneva. Headquarters in Gland, Switzerland The U.S. Government, and several agencies are members.Universal Declaration of Human Rights - adopted by U.N. General AssemblyEnvironmental Education - concept introduced to the U.N. by the IUCN.
1949 UNESCO Publication 356 (M) - "Toward World Understanding."
1951 The Nature Conservancy - organized.
1959 United Nations Development Program - evolved to maturity.
1960 Temple of Understanding - organized in New York. Dr. Robert Muller on Advisory Board.
1961 Freedom From War (M) - State Department Publication 7277, setting forth U.S. disarmament policy in favor of U.N. peacekeeping.World Wildlife Fund - organized by Julian Huxley and IUCN.
1964 Wilderness Act of 1964 - and how it came to be.UNCTAD - United Nations Conference on Trade and Development established.
1968 ECOSOC Resolution 1296 - directed by Dr. Robert Muller, establishes "Consultative Status" for NGOs (non-government organizations). Lucis Trust among first NGOs accredited.Club of Rome - organized, and published Limits to Growth.
1970 First Earth Day - founder, Gaylord Nelson. Another view of Earth Day.World Conference on Religion and Peace - opened headquartrs at the U.N. Center. Held conference in Kyoto, Japan, was accredited by ECOSOC in 1973.Environmental Protection Agency - created.
1971 <>RAMSAR Treaty on Wetlands - signed in Ramsar, Iran. IUCN driving force behind RAMSAR.
1972 Clean WaterAct - passed by Congress. Wetland definitionexpanded by lawsuit brought by "Tulloch"decision in 1993. Tulloch WorldHeritage Convention - adopted by UNESCO. EarthSummit I - First U.N. Conference on Environment.Maurice StrongConference leader.Cathedral of St. John theDivine in New York City.
1973 CITES Signed - (March 3 - Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). IUCN and WWF driving force behind CITES. Endangered Species Act - became U.S. law.U.N. Environment Program - launched with Maurice Strong first Executive Director.Trilateral Commission - formed, most participants also members of Council on Foreign Relations.UNEP's Regional Seas Program - expands environmental outreach. Survey of U.S. participation.
1975 Belgrade Charter - Global Framework for Environmental Education. Promoted by NAAEE
1976 HABITAT I - adopts U.N. policy on land. William K. Reilly and Carla Hills signed for U.S.Federal Land Policy Management Act - adopted.International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - becomes international law.UNIFEM - created to promote womens' rights.
1978 Global Taxation - first proposed by James Tobin. Current status.
1979 U.S. MAB (M) - (Man and the Biosphere Program) launched by agency agreement with UNESCO.First World Climate Conference - held in Geneva, Switzerland.World Core Curriculum - introduced by Dr. Robert Muller, through the Robert Muller Schools.CEDAW - (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) adopted by the U.N. General Assembly.
1980 World Conservation Strategy - published jointly by UNEP, IUCN, and WWF.MacBride Commission - (International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems. Report: Many Voices, One World. Chaired by Sean MacBride. Early efforts to control communications.Brandt Commission - (Independent Commission on International Development) chaired by Willy Brandt. Report: North-South: A Program for Survival linked economic equity to development and was beginning of "sustainable development" concept.
1982 Palme Commission - (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues). Report: Common Security: A Blueprint For Survival linked security to development. Chaired by Olof Palme.World Resources Institute - organized with help from Russell E. Train. Gustave Speth first director.World Charter for Nature - precursor to the Earth Charter.U.N. Convention on the Law of the seas - which created the International Seabed Authority.
1985 U.N. Convention on Ozone Depleting Substances - adopted in Vienna, Austria.
1987 Montreal Protocol - converts voluntary Ozone Treaty into international law.Brundtland Commission - (World Commission on Environment and Development). Report: Our Common Future, which defined "sustainable development". Chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Members included Shridath Ramphal and Maurice Strong (M).Institute for Global Communications - created by the Tides Fouundtion to facilitate NGO communications.
1988 Global Forum on Human Survival - held in Oxford, England. Co-sponsored by the Temple of Understanding and the U.N. Committee on Parliamentarians and Population, chaired by James Parks Morton. James Lovelock was the featured speaker. Complete background here (M).Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - created by WMO and UNEP.
1989 Berlin Wall falls - (November 9), USSR begins to disintegrate.Convention on Rights of the Child - adopted by the U.N.Climate Action Network - created in Germany to promote climate treaty.
1990 Global Forum on Human Survival - held in Moscow, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev, and Javier Perez de Cuellar, chaired by James Parks Morton.World Summit for Children - held in New York; adopted Plan of Action.Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) - created by Bella Abzug.International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) - created at the invitation of the U.N.,to advance Agenda 21 at the local level.
1991 Caring for the Earth - published jointly by UNEP, IUCN, and WWF.Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance - origin of Commission on Global Goverance.
1992 Commission on Global Governance - established. Willy Brandt, with the blessings of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, appointed Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal (IUCN president) as co-chairs.Global Biodiversity Strategy - published jointly by UNEP, IUCN, WWF, and WRI.U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) - Rio de Janeiro. Chaired by Maurice Strong. Produced: Agenda 21; Convention on Biological Diversity; Framework Convention on Climate Change; Statement of Forest Principles; and the Rio Declaration.U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development - created to advance Agenda 21.Earth Council - created in Costa Rica by Maurice Strong to coordinate global implementation of Agenda 21 through "National Councils" on Sustainable Development.National Religious Partnership for the Environment - outgrowth of Temple of Understanding's "Joint Appeal." The Wildlands Project - published by Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!. Project seeks to convert half of America to wilderness.
1993 President's Council on Sustainable Development - created by Executive Order No. 12852 to implement Agenda 21 in America, co-chaired by WRI president, Jonathan Lash.First Meridian Conference on Global Governance - held in Bolinas, California.World Conference on Human Rights - in Vienna.Green Cross - founded by Mikhail Gorbachev.BIONET - created to promote Convention on Biological Diversity.
1994 World Trade Organization - formed at Uruguay round of GATT negotiations.U.N. Conference on Population and Development - in Cairo
1995 World Summit on Social Development - in Copenhagen.Commission on Sustainable Development - met in New York.Fourth World Women's Congress - in Beijing. Documents.State of the World Forum - San Francisco, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev and Maruice Strong.Our Global Neighborhood - final report released by the Commission on Global Governance.Analysis - of Commission report.Global Biodiversity Assessment - released by UNEP. Coordinated by Robert Watson.
1996 U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (HABITAT II) - Istanbul. Community Sustainability (M), U.S. HUD's report to the conference. Instanbul Declaration on Human Settlements.Campaign for U.N. Reform - organized to lobby for global governance.
1997 Al Gore's report - to the U.N. at Rio +5. A broader view of Agenda 21 implementation.Kyoto Protocol - Adopted in Kyoto, Japan. Converts voluntary climate change treaty to binding international law. On-site reports.International Conference on Environment and Society - sponsored by UNESCO in Thessaloniki. Survey of environmental education movement.
1998 International Criminal Court - created in Rome. On-site reports from Rome.International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) - created to lobby for U.N. gun control.U.N. Climate Change Conference - in Buenos Aires.
1999 Charter for Global Democracy - consolidates recommendations of Commission on Global Governance into 12 principles.World NGO Conference - held in Canada to promote plan for "The Peoples Assembly."U.N. Climate Change Conference - in Bonn.
2000 Earth Charter - final draft.NGO Millennium Forum - New York, precursor to "The People's Assembly."UNDPI/NGO Forum - August 28 - 30, New York (to strengthen "Civil Society" in UN operations)Millennium Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders - August 28 - 31, New YorkState of the World Forum - September 4 - 10, New YorkMillennium Assembly - September 5 - 8, New YorkMillennium Summit - September 6 -8, New YorkU.N. Desertification Treaty ratified by U.S. Senate by voice vote.Bush-Gore election decided by U.S. Supreme Court. Chronology of this historic event. Map of Counties carried by Bush (red) and Gore (blue).Kyoto Negotiations collapse - November 13-25, The Hague, Netherlands.
2001 Bush rejects Kyoto Protocol (March). NGO reaction. European reaction.U.S. booted off U.N. Commission on Human Rights. (May) European view.U.S. booted off U.N.'s Narcotic Control Board. (May) Reaction. More reaction.Kyoto Protocol limps forwared without the U.S. (July)U.N. Conference on Racism, Durban, South Africa, August 31 - September 7. U.S. walks out of Durban Conference.Word Trade Center, Pentagon attacked by terrorists - September 11.Osoma bin Laden video tape transcript, December 13, admission of responsibility.

CRITICAL CHOICES

2007-01-29T12:58:00.000-08:00

CRITICAL CHOICES The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance
CRITICAL CHOICES
The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance

Wolfgang H. Reinicke and Francis Deng
with Jan Martin Witte, Thorsten Benner, Beth Whitaker, and John Gershman

IDRC 2000
ISBN 0-88936-921-6
164 pp.

Disponible en français
The world that we live in today is changing dramatically. Economic and political liberalization, together with accelerating technological change, are driving the extraordinary process we know as "globalization." This new global environment requires new approaches, new ideas, and innovative tools to address new challenges in areas as different as weapons control, climate change, genetic engineering, and labour standards.
Critical Choices looks at one such tool: global public policy networks. In these networks, governments, international organizations, the corporate sector, and civil society join together to achieve what none can accomplish on its own. The authors explore both the promises and the limitations of this new form of global cooperation. They discuss how such networks might contribute to better manage the risks and make use of the opportunities that globalization presents. Finally, they offer provocative advice and solid recommendations on how the United Nations can foster such networks in the years ahead.
The United Nations faces a set of critical choices. It must not only be a haven for its member states but also needs to find ways to collaborate with civil society and the global business community in tackling the challenges that lie ahead. By promoting global public policy networks, the UN will more effectively serve its member states and fulfill its mission to address the problems of humanity.
Critical Choices outlines promising ways of how global public policy networks can help to meet the governance challenges of the 21st century and equips policymakers with a practical toolbox to manage globalization. It is in the interest of governments to engage in these “coalitions for change” to better be able to meet their responsibilities toward their citizens.
— Caio Koch-Weser (State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany)
Critical Choices breaks new ground on how to forge partnerships to better meet the challenge of making globalization work for all — North and South. It is a must-read for everyone concerned with building a truly inclusive system of global governance.
— Sonia Picado Sotela (National Congresswoman, Costa Rica)
Critical Choices couldn’t be more timely and helpful in drawing attention to the growing importance of cross-sectoral partnerships in meeting the multiple challenges of global governance. Members of the United Nations and concerned citizens everywhere would do well to note its findings and embrace its recommendations.
— Tadashi Yamamoto (President, Japan Center for International Exchange)
Critical Choices offers a working blueprint for addressing some of the key dilemmas facing governments and international organisations in a rapidly changing world. Tri-sectoral global public policy networks — involving governments, business, and the nonprofit sector — provide a new model for building a more dynamic, participative, and effective system of global governance.
— Thilo Bode (Executive Director, Greenpeace International)
Critical Choices reaches a simple but powerful conclusion: that global public policy networks can play an increasingly important role in addressing the governance and policy issues facing the global community. This conclusion resonates with our experience in Shell, and with that of some others in the business community, that networks of diverse stakeholders can make a positive contribution in addressing complex business and societal issues.
— Mark Moody-Stuart (Chairman, Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies)
Book(s) 101 of 207

Document(s)

Foreword Maureen O'Neil (President, IDRC) 2003-07-28

Preface 2003-07-28

Executive Summary 2003-07-28
Origins and objectives; A range of activities; The care and tending of networks; What role for the United Nations?; Conclusions.

Chapter 1: Introduction 2003-07-27

Chapter 2. A Changing External Environment 2003-07-27
Economic and political liberalization; Technological change; The multidimensional impacts of liberalization and technological change; Complexity and the risks of a partial view; The participatory gap; States, international organizations, and the imperative of change.

Chapter 3. What Do Networks Do? 2003-07-27
A primer on networks; Placing issues on the global agenda; Negotiating and setting standards and regulations; Developing and disseminating knowledge; Making and deepening markets; Implementing ideas and decisions; Closing the participatory gap.

Chapter 4. Network Management 2003-07-26
Getting the network off the ground; Balancing adequate consultation and goal delivery; Securing sustainable funding; Maintaining the "structure" in structured informality; Finding allies outside one's sector; Tackling the dual challenge of inclusion.

Chapter 5. Networks and the United Nations 2003-07-26
From vision to reality: a three-track approach; Roles for the United Nations in GPP networks; Making the United Nations fit for GPP networks.

Chapter 6. Conclusion 2003-07-26

Appendix 1. Acronyms and Abbreviations 2003-07-26

Appendix 2. Case Studies of the UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks 2003-07-26

Appendix 3. Workshop Participants 2003-07-26

Appendix 4. Bibliography 2003-07-26
Network theory, collaboration, and partnership; International organizations, change, and learning; Management and networks; Knowledge management; Civil society and governance; The private sector and transnational relations; Social capital; Publications by the staff of the UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks.

Appendix 5. The Authors, the Publisher, and the Sponsor 2003-07-25

Foreword
Document(s) 1 of 14
Maureen O'Neil (President, IDRC)

Our world is getting smaller. Political and economic liberalization, together with sweeping technological change, have made all of humanity more interdependent. New and exciting opportunities are emerging, as are new risks and new challenges. Undoubtedly, globalization has emerged as the key governance challenge for the 21st century, and making globalization sustainable will require creative new forms of cooperation by all sectors of our society.
This report is a major contribution to the ongoing debate on globalization and governance. It goes beyond the merely theoretical by presenting one practical and promising avenue to address governance challenges: global public-policy (GPP) networks. In these networks, states, international organizations, civil society, and the corporate sector collaborate to make globalization work for all.
Over its 30-year history, Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has helped to establish many such networks. IDRC's experience in facilitating, through research and policy networks, South-South and South-North collaboration truly exhibits that the sum is often greater that its constituent parts. Take, for example, the Crucible Group. Supported by IDRC, the Canadian International Development Agency, and a number of other international organizations, the Group includes members from private industry, government, advocacy groups, and aboriginal groups. Since 1993 it has provided a forum for serious debate and policy recommendations on intellectual property rights, biodiversity, and food security.
Building on existing knowledge, the authors of Critical Choices explore both the promise and the limits of GPP networks. They present hands-on practical advice on the design, implementation, and promotion of GPP networks and explore how this new form of cooperation could help address the risks and opportunities presented by globalization.
In our globalizing world, the United Nations needs to find ways to collaborate with civil society and the global business community in tackling the challenges that lie ahead. By promoting GPP networks, the United Nations will more effectively serve its member states and fulfill its mission to address the problems of humanity. It is our task to make these networks work for all, in both North and South.
Maureen O'Neil
President
International Development Research Centre

Preface
Document(s) 2 of 14

The UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy (GPP) Networks was launched in early July 1999 in Washington, DC. In the following 5 months, the project team worked on numerous activities in addition to this report. The GPP website has been developed into an important tool for advertising project activities and obtaining important information and other inputs for the project. It allowed an electronic dialogue to be launched on topics pertinent to the GPP theme. The project held several workshops and seminars in Washington in cooperation with the United Nations Strategic Planning Unit, the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank. A number of publications were completed during the project's duration, and team members prepared briefings for policymakers; members of the business, academic, and policy communities; activists; and foundations (see various appendixes). The GPP theme featured in several speeches and keynote addresses at meetings and conferences in the United States and abroad. Finally, the project was able to attract additional funding from several foundations, which was critical to the team's ability to deliver on these activities and others to be conducted over the next several months. More information can be found on the GPP website (www.globalpublicpolicy.net).
The UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks relied on the principles of network-building. Christina Bishop, Sören Buttkereit, and Travis Creighton supported the many additional activities that the project undertook, and David Earnest designed and managed the website. Their effort and dedication lie at the heart of this project. We are also grateful to our case-study authors, who, in most cases on short notice, each provided us with an analysis of a particular network of interest (see Appendix 2 for a list). Numerous colleagues provided valuable comments on the design of the project and drafts of the report. They include Monica Baker, Amy Batson, Ron Berenbeim, John Briscoe, Michael Edwards, Mohamed El-Ashry, Hansjörg Elshorst, Jean-Claude Faby, Curtis Farrar, Michael Feller, Martha Finnemore, Hilary French, Harald Fuhr, Ashraf Ghani, Branislav Gosovic, Geeta Rao Gupta, Ernst B. Haas, Astrid Harnisch, Richard Higgot, Paul Isenman, Jacqueline Kaiko, Barbara Kohnen, R. Andreas Krämer, Ralf Juan Leiteritz, Carlos Lozada, Edward Luck, Kamal Malhotra, Hanns W. Maull, Cord Meier-Klodt, Jennifer Mitchell, Jennifer Mosley, Andreas Obser, Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, Thomas Risse, Frank Rittner, James N. Rosenau, Edward Peter Russell, Charles Sabel, Arshad Sayed, Hans-Peter Schipulle, Susan Sechler, Kathryn Sikkink, John Steinbruner, Achim Steiner, John Stremlau, Maurice Strong, Raimo Vayrynen, Joe L. Washington, Steven Weber, Hans-Heinrich Wrede, and Michael Zürn, as well as the participants in our three workshops. Michael Treadway edited the report and drafted the executive summary.
We are grateful to the members of our advisory board for their support of the project. Wolfgang H. Reinicke would like to thank James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, for granting him a partial secondment from his duties at the World Bank for the duration of the project. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Hoechst Foundation.

Executive Summary
Document(s) 3 of 14

Profound and continuing change in our global environment -- social, political, and economic -- today demands commensurate changes in our institutions of global governance, not least in the institution that lies at the core of the international system, the United Nations. The organization faces a series of critical choices in responding to these fundamental challenges. Creative new arrangements are needed urgently to allow governments, other organizations, both public and private, and individuals around the world to work together to address pressing global problems -- from weapons control, to the lack of adequate global labour standards, to climate change -- as they arise. This report examines one such set of arrangements: global public-policy (GPP) networks.
Having developed in the shadow of traditional multilateralism, GPP networks are protean things, difficult to define or typologize. This is so precisely because they have grown up largely independently of each other to serve widely differing purposes. They do, however, have a few things in common. One common denominator is that they link together interested individuals and institutions not only from diverse countries but also from diverse sectors of activity: local, national, and regional governments; transnational corporations and other businesses and their associations; and what has come to be called civil society. They thus cut cleanly across the fault lines between various sectors, existing organizations, and sovereign territories. Another commonality is that all these networks have made intense and often ingenious use of the new information technologies that for several decades have been transforming our workplaces, our markets, and many of our other social institutions. These "trisectoral" networks have already proved themselves to be effective, often remarkably so, in bringing together diverse and sometimes opposing groups to discuss common problems that no one of them can resolve by itself; and in marshaling resources -- intellectual, financial, physical -- to bring to bear on those problems.
ORIGINS AND OBJECTIVES
Broadly speaking, GPP networks emerged as a response to two dynamic forces that took shape and spread throughout the world in the late 20th century. The first is liberalization, both economic and political. Economic liberalization, by opening markets, increasing competition, and encouraging the spread of capital, skills, and know-how worldwide, promises to raise standards of living in those countries that have embraced it. But the rapid dismantling of barriers to trade and capital flows has also had negative spillover effects, of which the recent financial crises in East Asia, Latin America, and the Russian Federation are prominent examples. At the same time, political liberalization in many countries has brought greater democracy to millions who long yearned for it, but it has also brought greater complexity to political and social issues and interactions.
The second broad force driving change is the technological revolution, and in particular the revolution in information technology. Technological change, too, has had immensely beneficial effects on the way we interact in commerce, public affairs, and society. But it has also made social, cultural, and economic relations far more complex and intertwined -- and harder to predict and stabilize -- and the pace of that change has clearly outstripped the ability of governments to manage the rapid consequences of the succession of technological advances.
The negative effects of these two sweeping forces on institutions of global governance may be characterized in terms of two governance gaps. First, an operational gap has opened up wherever policymakers and public institutions have simply found themselves lacking the information, knowledge, and tools they need to respond to the daunting complexity of policy issues in a liberalizing, technologizing, globalizing world. Second, but related to the first, a participatory gap has manifested itself as this same increasing complexity thwarts common understanding of, and therefore agreement on, critical policy issues. This has sometimes led policymakers, intentionally or not, to exclude the general public or particular stakeholders from their deliberations.
GPP networks have lately emerged as a "growth industry," precisely as a way of bridging these gaps. GPP networks are learning organizations. Their broad membership allows them to tap information and expertise from a variety of backgrounds, thus providing a more complete picture of particular policy issues and giving voice to previously unheard groups. These networks are meant to complement public-policy institutions, not replace them. They help governments and multilateral agencies manage risks, take advantage of opportunities presented by technological change, be more responsive to their constituents, and promote change within bureaucracies.
A RANGE OF ACTIVITIES
GPP networks address governance gaps by performing a variety of diverse functions. This report highlights six of the most important of these, although, again, no simple typology can do justice to the full range of network activities. Most of the networks perform several of these activities, but each network does not necessarily perform all or even most of them:
· GPP networks get involved in placing new issues on the global agenda or raising the prominence of issues that have been neglected. All such networks do this to some degree, but one type of network -- what has been called a transnational advocacy network -- makes global consciousness-raising its primary objective. Advocacy networks often excel at making strategic use of the media and influential individuals. They typically articulate clear and narrowly focused goals for their activities and frame their chosen issue in a way that will have maximum impact, often by couching it in the language of a moral imperative. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines is a model of a global network that concentrated on a single issue and waged a successful media campaign to raise awareness of the problem and move toward its resolution.
· GPP networks facilitate the negotiating and setting of global standards. This is happening in areas as diverse as financial regulation and environmental management. Whereas agenda-setting often can be accomplished by a relatively few dedicated individuals, the complexity of negotiating and setting standards, as well as concerns of fairness and equity, typically requires the involvement of stakeholders from all sectors on a representative basis. Trisectoral networks can help overcome stalemates in highly conflict-ridden policy arenas. The World Commission on Dams (WCD) is a prototypical example: this network has managed to break the deadlock among development planners, contractors, and environmental groups over the building of large dams. It shows what can be accomplished with a truly trisectoral structure in terms of both membership and funding. Through case studies, a review process, and various consultations, the WCD aims to assist future decision-making on the planning, design, monitoring, and operation of large dams.
· Networks are natural mechanisms for
gathering and disseminating knowledge,
and some GPP networks make this their principal activity. The information technology revolution allows all kinds of knowledge, technical and nontechnical, to be shared without regard for distance or borders and at ever-lower cost. Networks that focus on this kind of activity tend to be especially successful when they link participants with access to various knowledge bases and when all participants are willing to rethink their own ideas and practices -- to learn and relearn as well as to teach. One of the oldest global networks, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has contributed enormously to the discovery and worldwide propagation of new crop strains and farming techniques. Yet this well-established network has shown the flexibility to expand its purview to issues of sustainable production systems and has adopted a strong poverty focus. CGIAR has also created new institutional forms to increase the participation of stakeholders from all three sectors and respond to other challenges.
· GPP networks may also have a commercial dimension -- making new markets where they are lacking and deepening markets that are failing to fulfill their potential. Left to their own devices, markets sometimes fail to produce certain goods -- public goods -- that the broader public interest demands. GPP networks can help bridge this gap between demand and supply. The Medicines for Malaria Venture, for example, is a global network that seeks to improve the economic incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop badly needed new antimalarial vaccines. Networks, by providing links to other sources of both finance and information about best practice, are also helping a host of microlending enterprises in developing countries to improve and expand their operations.
· Some GPP networks are designed specifically as innovative implementation mechanisms for traditional intergovernmental treaties. The Global Environment Facility has increasingly turned to trisectoral networking to achieve its mission of funding and implementing worthy projects in the area of environmental protection.
Much of what networks accomplish through these five functions can be thought of as products in some sense -- sounder standards, better information, more complete markets. But networks also improve the process by which all these products and others come into being, and in so doing they help close the participatory gap, the sixth function. The intangible outcomes of networks -- such as greater trust between participants and the creation of a forum for raising and discussing other new issues -- are often as important as the tangible ones, and they may endure even longer. Transparency International, for example, has not only scored significant successes in the fight against official corruption but also built coalitions of trust between very diverse actors in this sensitive issue area.
THE CARE AND TENDING OF NETWORKS
This description of GPP networks may foster the impression that networks sprout and grow almost naturally when the need for them arises and the circumstances are propitious. And sometimes, in a sense, they do. Networks are nothing if not situational and opportunistic. But that does not mean they do not need careful cultivation and nurturing. Managing a network requires skilful social entrepreneurship, flexibility, imagination, and the ability to learn on the fly.
Perhaps most important, those who would presume to manage a network must first understand that it is seldom they, the managers, who will develop the solution to the problem that the network was formed to address. More often it is the stakeholders themselves who find the answers. But network managers play several critical roles, including that of managing the tensions and conflicts that inevitably arise from a committed search among disparate parties for solutions to real problems, and doing so in a way that keeps the participants engaged. Some of the functions that might appear in a network manager's job description are listed below:
· Getting the network off the ground
-- The first task, of course, is getting the network up and running. Often it is the vision, dynamism, and resolve of one or a few individuals -- like Kadar Asmal, in the case of the WCD, or US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, with the Apparel Industry Partnership -- that provide the spark for a new network. In other cases the needed leadership is institutional: an example is the World Health Organization's role in launching the Roll Back Malaria initiative. Would-be founders of a network must concentrate on getting the network dynamics right from the start, which means getting the right people on board and creating a common, shared vision. They must also make sure that participants recognize their dependence on each other and on innovative collective thinking to solve the problem at hand. The leaders must take pains not to allow the network to become too closely tied to themselves or another individual or institution; rather, they must be willing, even eager, to share power and to "lead from behind."
· Balancing adequate consultation and goal delivery
-- A second challenge is getting the process right while getting the product out the door. It is important to allow for extensive consultation and discussion, especially in the start-up phase and when the participants have heretofore been adversaries or competitors. This gives legitimacy to the network process -- but it also risks delay in achieving the results that the participants and their constituencies demand. Networks can help keep their efforts on the rails by setting "milestones" against which to measure their progress. They can also sometimes engineer "easy wins" that help to satisfy their constituencies while allowing longer incubating work to proceed.
· Securing sustainable funding --
All networks, even the most ad hoc and ephemeral, absorb resources, and resources cost money. Therefore, ensuring adequate funding for the network's activities is an inescapable task for network managers. Also, the manner in which funding is obtained is vital for the network's credibility and sustainability. Often, support needs to be trisectoral in nature, rather than coming from a single donor or sector, although this is less important for some networks, such as those whose primary purpose is implementation.
· Maintaining the "structure" in structural informality -- Networks must avoid falling into the trap of becoming just another institution with an established bureaucracy and a rigid hierarchy. Network managers must therefore focus on maintaining "structured informality" -- on keeping relationships loose and unconfining while building in enough organization and framework to get things done. One way to dodge the institutional trap is to build the network on existing institutions, keeping the network's own secretariat to a minimum. Built-in review processes, internal and external, can also help prevent ossification of the network's structures, practices, and people.
· Finding allies outside one's sector -- A useful strategy in fostering networks and their goals is to actively look for possible alliances across sectors. Sectors, after all, are not monolithic, and sometimes intrasectoral divides create opportunities for innovative intersectoral networking, where people and institutions in diverse sectors can find common ground.
· Tackling the dual challenge of inclusion -- Even in a world where political liberalization and technological change have made it far easier than before for people to connect, inclusion of all interested parties in a network's activities remains difficult. Much of a network manager's efforts relate to tackling the dual challenge of local-global and North-South inclusion, that is, bringing local interested parties into the global dialogue and bringing stakeholders in developing countries into a process that tends to be dominated by industrial-country elites. But inclusion is crucial to a network's legitimacy and accountability, as well as important on a normative basis. It is also a practical imperative: networks often need local people and institutions to implement their decisions on the ground. Networks have pursued various strategies to achieve greater inclusion. They can define and pursue multiple levels of engagement, for example by establishing organizations at the national level whose deliberations feed into the global network. They can establish structures that institutionalize inclusion, such as representative-voting arrangements and innovative funding mechanisms. They can build on existing initiatives and approaches, working from the bottom up. Or they can do the opposite, adapting global policies to fit local realities. Finally, networks can help build up the limited financial and organizational capacity of those local and developing-country actors whose inclusion they seek, such as by providing access to information technology, expertise, or direct funding.
WHAT ROLE FOR THE UNITED NATIONS?
The leadership of the United Nations has begun to place the idea of GPP networks at the forefront of its vision and strategy. In his 1999 address to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed the following:
The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community, and civil society.
This statement indicates a clear recognition that for the United Nations to succeed in its mission in the new millennium, it needs to develop a systematic and reliable approach to working with all sectors.
The Secretary General's Millennium Report -- We, the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, in support of which this publication was written -- points out the importance of global public policy networks in redefining the role of the UN:
Formal institutional arrangements may often lack the scope, speed and informational capacity to keep up with the rapidly changing global agenda. Mobilizing 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. The United Nations is well situated to nurture such informal "coalitions for change" across our various areas of responsibility.
By acting as a facilitator and platform for GPP networks, the United Nations can play an intermediary role between states, whose rationale and legitimacy for the foreseeable future will remain constrained by territorial sovereignty, and business and civil society, which, taking advantage of open markets and the technological revolution, have long escaped those constraints. By working with GPP networks and facilitating their emergence, the United Nations can help strengthen the capacities of state and nonstate actors to participate in the development of GPP while increasing its own effectiveness and credibility. In many ways, the future of GPP networks is the future of the United Nations, and vice versa.
The United Nations has been involved in many of the networks discussed in this report. However, it has yet to develop a strategic approach on how best to coordinate its efforts to engage in GPP networks. This report proposes a three-track approach that is both visionary and feasible:
· Strengthen and consolidate existing networks by focusing on implementation and learning processes;
· Build implementation networks that will help to revitalize weak or weakening conventions that are important to the UN's mission; and
· Launch new networks where they are needed.
To implement this three-track approach and decide on its own role in a strategic manner, the United Nations has to become more selective in its network involvement, on the basis of its own comparative advantages. As the case studies surveyed in the report show, the United Nations can play various roles at various times in GPP networks:
· The organization can act as convenor by, for example, organizing meetings on issues where conflicts occur across the North-South divide;
· UN agencies can act as providers of a platform and a safe space for negotiations and the development of consensual knowledge;
· Staff can act as social entrepreneurs, using the skilled leadership of top UN officials but also focusing on inclusion, effectiveness, and results at the operational level;
· UN agencies can act as norm entrepreneurs in such areas as sustainable human development, human rights, and disarmament;
· UN agencies can act as multilevel network managers by coordinating program activities or developing strategies for interacting with appropriate levels of governance;
· UN agencies can act as capacity-builders to ensure inclusiveness, both from a local-global and a North-South perspective; and
· Despite increasing difficulty, in some rare cases the United Nations can act as financier for operational programs.
The United Nations needs to develop mechanisms for the prioritization and coordination of those nascent issues that call for UN involvement. It also needs to ensure that its own activities neither duplicate the work of other multilateral organizations nor work at cross-purposes to them.
The Administrative Committee on Coordination and the United Nations Development Group are two venues within the UN system that could complement each other's activities to fulfill the many tasks that successful network management, including implementation, requires. In addition, a clearinghouse could be set up to act as an information hub for network activities, both within the United Nations and beyond. For the United Nations to become an active player in GPP networks, it needs to reach out to its external partners. One stepping-stone to improving relations and entering into a constructive strategic dialogue with key actors from nongovernmental organizations and the business community would be to develop the Global Compact on a trisectoral basis. By making itself a safe place for all the key actors to convene to negotiate politically controversial issues, the United Nations could fill a major gap in governance.
CONCLUSIONS
The United Nations faces a set of critical choices. The world organization needs to pay attention to its ability to offer itself as a safe place, not only for its traditional stakeholders -- member governments -- but also for the business community and civil society. Trisectoral networks provide the United Nations with a mechanism to rebuild its credibility and, indeed, the only way to achieve its increasingly complex missions with scarce resources in the 21st century. The organization's ability to effectively initiate, maintain, and participate in such networks will largely determine the extent to which it can achieve its mission -- not least in the eyes of its constituents.
By successfully engaging in GPP networks, the United Nations performs a vital service to its member states. For it is they that are ultimately strengthened by these networks' activities. It is crucial for member states of the United Nations to understand that GPP networks are meant, not to replace governments, but to complement them. Networks help member states take advantage of the benefits and address the challenges of technological change and economic and social integration and thus perform their duties to their citizens in a more effective and legitimate way. GPP networks represent a unique opportunity for governments to regain the initiative in the debate over the future of global governance.
GPP networks embrace the very forces of globalization that have confounded and complicated traditional governance structures, challenging the operational capacity and democratic responsiveness of governments. They are distinctive in their ability to bring people and institutions from diverse backgrounds together, often when they have been working against one another for years. Making use of the strength of weak ties, networks can handle this diversity of actors precisely because of the productive tensions on which they rest. GPP networks do not offer an easy ride, but the difficulties are well worth the risk, given the daunting challenges of a complex world with an ever-expanding multiplicity of actors, interests, and issues to be resolved.
The stakes are high. Globalization is not, after all, the end of history. It is time to take a proactive stance lest we witness a full-fledged backlash against globalization. The status quo is unsustainable, and a change for the worse by forcing globalization back into national boundaries -- "moving forward into the past" -- is not an unlikely scenario. Networks can help to change this unsustainable status quo for the better, by responding to the challenges and taking full advantage of technological change and economic and social integration. Ultimately, it is up to the political will of the member states to endorse such a course of action. But it is the duty of the United Nations to lay out to its members the challenges that face them at the dawning of the new millennium and offer them an achievable agenda for meeting those challenges.

Chapter 1: Introduction
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At the beginning of the 21st century, globalization has become the term of choice to describe the changing external environment in which all of us, individuals and institutions, now live and work. Yet, so far at least, governments and international organizations have fallen short in their efforts to develop mechanisms to allow their citizens to take full advantage of the opportunities that globalization offers. Nor have they succeeded in developing mechanisms that effectively respond to the risks that a social and economic transformation of this scope entails. This report discusses a mechanism -- global public-policy (GPP) networks -- that has the potential to address both of these needs, and it considers their implications for international organizations in general and the United Nations in particular.
Two forces, by now familiar to us all, stand out as driving the change in our international environment. First, for almost four decades now, a general trend toward economic and political liberalization has reshaped the international system. Economic liberalization has opened markets, increased competition, and sharpened the international division of labour. For many years this development was considered for the most part uncontroversial. But during the last decade, the dismantling of economic barriers has been met with growing apprehension, as transnational economic activity has generated a variety of negative spillover effects that governments and international organizations have so far been unable to address in a satisfactory manner. At the same time, many countries have been undergoing a related but often conflict-ridden process of political liberalization. This has fostered the growth of organizations representing what has come to be called civil society, and it has enabled them to build transnational linkages and alliances. Meanwhile, both political and economic liberalization have spurred the growth and reach of transnational corporations, which today account for a substantial share of economic activity in many countries.
The changes wrought by economic and political liberalization have been sweeping. Yet even they have been superseded by the second force now reshaping the environment for international organizations. That force is the technological revolution, which already has brought lasting and profound changes to the world we live in. For governments in particular, technological change has transformed the way in which information and knowledge are created, processed, and disseminated; managing this flow of information constitutes the key challenge that public institutions face nowadays. Although technological advances may actually strengthen public institutions to some degree, their rapidity has clearly outstripped governments' ability to structure and make adequate use of them. Technological change has also made social, cultural, and economic relations more intertwined and more complex and inherently more difficult to predict or stabilize. The financial crisis that recently erupted in Asia and the debate about the appropriate social response to scientific advances in the genetic modification of organisms are two disparate but dramatic illustrations of what policymakers are up against. It is almost self-evident that deeper social and economic integration, coupled with the revolution in technology, requires that a growing number of "public goods" be provided at the global level. Less clear is whether the right structures and institutions now exist at the global level to facilitate such a process. After all, what is or is not in the public interest is not something that can be determined a priori. Rather, it is the outcome of the public-policy-making process, which in any system governed by democratic principles must be participatory and transparent and reflect the view of the majority of those affected.
Although many would argue that international institutions are the obvious and appropriate choice in facilitating such "global public-policy" processes, they are presently not adequately prepared for the task. In fact, the forces described above present direct and immediate challenges to the current architecture of global governance, at the core of which is the United Nations. The geographic reach and accelerated pace of economic and social activity, the growing recognition of the daunting complexity of many public-policy issues, and the acknowledgment that many issues must embrace a perspective on intergenerational equity have all created an operational gap, as policymakers and institutions often simply lack the information, knowledge, and tools to respond. In addition, political liberalization and technological change have opened a participatory gap, as individuals and private organizations increasingly perceive themselves as excluded from policy decision-making in their supposedly democratic institutions. Policymakers and international public institutions can no longer afford to bypass the concerns of the private sector and civil society, which have successfully politicized many global issues and have accumulated significant financial, ideological, and bargaining resources. There can be no doubt that the continuing inability of public institutions -- states and international organizations alike -- to address both these gaps will ultimately put their legitimacy at risk or provoke a backlash against liberalization and technological change. Indeed, there are clear signs that both are already starting to happen.
Today's global environment demands creative institutional arrangements to allow governments, other organizations, and individuals to agree upon and solve emerging global problems, whose number and intensity will only continue to grow. This report examines one such set of arrangements, which we call GPP networks. GPP networks are a means of responding to the uncertain and rapidly changing conditions of our relentlessly liberalizing and technologizing global environment. They address problems that defy disaggregation and parcelization among technocrats within a territorial hierarchy. Yet, like the global challenges they seek to address, the solutions they offer both reflect and embody the underlying forces of technological change and integration. GPP networks create bridges between the public sector -- national, provincial, state, and local governments, as well as intergovernmental bodies -- and the other two sectors of our society: the business community and civil society. These trisectoral networks have the potential to pull diverse groups and resources together and address issues that no one sector can resolve by itself. By no means are these networks only about "process" -- to the contrary. As the case studies surveyed in this report show, they also deliver tangible outcomes -- for example, extending credit to the poor, assisting countries facing environmental challenges, and fighting infectious diseases.
Many efforts made thus far to describe and analyze the structures and processes of global governance have tended to focus on more formal, established institutions and organizations. By concentrating on these old and well-worn stories, we may be missing a quiet revolution. Equating politics with political institutions masks a simple truth: individuals and groups, not bureaucracies or formal institutions, drive innovation and learning. Change is a bottom-up process, not a top-down steering committee. Until recently, only the most prominent and vocal networks, such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), have caught the public's attention; others, such as the World Commission on Dams (WCD) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), are less well known. But there are already as many as 50-60 GPP networks in existence, ranging in focus from crime and pollution to fisheries and public health.
Their informal and often legally nonbinding character may partly explain why the story of GPP networks has gotten little attention. But until that story is told, policymakers must make do with little concrete information and knowledge about these organizations. What are their capacities? What are their limits? How do they differ from one another? Why do some succeed, and why do others fail? Can they (and should they) be "managed"? With so many networks in operation, can we yet discern best practices? And what role, if any, do they offer for international organizations, and the United Nations in particular, to play? These questions must be answered for GPP networks to attract the attention they deserve and demonstrate the value they can add.
In recent years, many scholars and policymakers have claimed that the increased role that corporate actors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are playing in global politics undermines state capacity or the effectiveness of international organizations, especially the United Nations. However, this is not always the case. To the contrary, as this report shows, cooperation across different sectors often helps states and international organizations to live up to their commitments and fulfill their missions. One thing we can say is that the sheer variety of networks we encounter suggests that there is not yet a consistent pattern of network-building; they seem to develop differently according to their differing circumstances and conditions. Networks are nothing if not situational and opportunistic. This poses limits on how much this report can deliver in terms of systematic analysis, conclusions, and recommendations. For this reason, the report does not attempt to force all of these various networks into a rigid typology or structure for analysis. Indeed, the very nature of networks may make this an elusive goal. Rather, we take an inductive approach, scrutinizing and describing what is out there, trying to discern best practices, and pointing to some initial lessons learned -- lessons that we hope will help maintain and strengthen existing networks and perhaps launch new ones to face the challenges ahead.
It is too early to determine the full potential of trisectoral networks -- or their limits. We might well be in the early stages of a paradigm shift (to use Thomas Kuhn's now-familiar phrase) in global governance, the frontiers of which remain to be explored. As Kuhn reminds us, under these circumstances practice will inform theory and improve our understanding of how these networks tick and where they can be useful. Of course, networks are no panacea for the world's problems, but using them wisely will no doubt improve our ability to cope with the difficult challenges posed by rapid global liberalization, technological change, and the complexity these trends have brought to our lives.
Chapter 2 fleshes out our characterization of the two global forces transforming the world. These forces, often lumped together under the catch-all term globalization, are already quite familiar and require no detailed elaboration, and so we focus on their features that are relevant to later discussion. The chapter then considers the implications of this transformation and concludes that two gaps, operational and participatory, have emerged in global governance and have challenged national and international public institutions in a fundamental way.
Chapter 3 presents empirical evidence confirming the relevance of GPP networks in taking on the challenges identified in Chapter 2. After a brief overview of the foundations of network theory and its implications for the organization of global governance, we turn to an examination of what we regard as the core functions that networks perform. This examination is based on the case studies commissioned for this report. (Appendix 2 lists the case studies and their authors.) If managed in an effective and legitimate manner, GPP networks can indeed narrow the governance gaps.
Chapter 4 identifies several critical managerial issues common to almost all GPP networks and distils the lessons, positive and negative, that can be learned from existing cases. What is the role of leadership? How can networks best combine consultation and delivery? How can sustainable funding be ensured? How can networks meet the dual challenge of inclusion (North-South and local-global)?
Chapter 5 discusses what role there is for the United Nations, the only truly universal world organization, to play with respect to GPP networks. A review of the UN's experience with networks to date leaves little doubt that the organization can appropriately take on several critical functions in support of networking. But even as a changing global environment has made the UN's engagement in networks an attractive proposition, the organization's own future relevance and ability to deliver on its mission are by no means assured. Critical for the UN's success in GPP networks, and thus in global governance at large, will be its ability to define its role carefully and selectively. Such a process of prioritization will in part be driven by external forces, in particular by the fact that the United Nations is an intergovernmental organization serving the interests of its members. But it should also be driven by internal considerations, in particular an analysis of the institution's own organizational strengths and weaknesses. Mindful of the political and economic constraints the United Nations is facing, but with a view toward positioning the United Nations in a strategic manner, the chapter closes with some recommendations to enhance its role in the initiation, maintenance, and operation of GPP networks so as to maximize opportunities for expanding the organization's impact.
GPP networks are not a substitute for existing institutions of global governance. Rather, they are a complement. However, to succeed they will require adjustment -- both organizational and behavioural -- on the part of others: nonstate actors, such as corporations and NGOs, as well as state actors, such as governments and international organizations. The leaders of the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Bank, are keenly aware of the promise that a greater reliance on networks holds. Knowing that their own future is at stake, these organizations have begun to embrace the network concept and call for institutional change. There should be no illusions, however: global public-policy-making through collaborative networks is likely to challenge deeply entrenched political, economic, and bureaucratic interests. Trisectoral networks call hierarchies and their principles into question. Although it seems reasonable to expect that policymakers and bureaucrats will try for as long as possible to adjust by adding new structures or adopting new functions at the margin, a more genuine overhaul of their governance structures and activities may prove necessary in the long run. The United Nations thus faces a set of critical choices in the future that require creativity and leadership, both of which are usually in short supply. This report highlights some of these choices and hopes to offer strategic guidance.

Chapter 2. A Changing External Environment
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What are the challenges to which GPP networks respond? What are the forces that drive their development? What underlying changes in the international system make GPP networks such a potentially useful tool to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of global governance? This chapter lays out the framework for our examination of GPP networks by analyzing the two momentous developments that today propel continuous change in the environment of our global public institutions: political and economic liberalization and technological change. Although both developments play a role in the emergence of what we call an operational gap in global governance, this chapter argues that they also cause a participatory gap that undermines the legitimacy of existing governance mechanisms: the state and the multilateral system. And though part of the challenge is technocratic, one should not underestimate the role of norms and values in creating those gaps -- and in resolving them. After all, public-policy-making is a difficult process that involves conflict and the reconciliation of divergent interests.
Since the birth of the United Nations in 1945 the international system has undergone a dramatic transformation, which accelerated during the last decade. Policymakers, national and international alike, face a rapidly changing external environment. A broad wave of economic and political liberalization around the world, together with rapid technological advances, continues to generate profound challenges for public institutions and bureaucrats. The public sector's inability to adequately absorb and respond to these forces has led to two governance gaps that are evident in public-policy-making today.
The first of these gaps arises from the fact that a growing number of public-policy issues can no longer be effectively addressed in existing institutional frameworks, whether at the national or at the intergovernmental level. The increasing geographic reach and complexity of public-policy issues and the speed with which they arise and propagate make governance an ever more convoluted and frustrating process. The resulting operational gap in governance is a serious challenge to public-policymakers.
The second gap is directly related to the first. As states and international organizations lose their credibility and legitimacy, in part because of the operational shortcomings just described, an acute participatory gap emerges in international governance. Private entities, in business and civil society, many of which have successfully reorganized themselves on the transnational level, now operate in a governance vacuum. They are acutely aware that no institutional framework now exists to adequately express and aggregate their interests and implement solutions to their problems in line with the most basic models of democratic governance. Although perhaps less glaring than the operational gap, this participatory gap is by no means less important, and it deserves equal attention and innovative thinking.
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION
For almost four decades now, a general trend of increasing economic and political liberalization has reshaped the international system. Economic liberalization has opened up markets and increased competition and the international division of labour. Following the principles of liberal internationalism, states have deliberately deregulated and liberalized their domestic economies, opening them to international trade and capital flows, including foreign direct investment (FDI). Private enterprises, taking advantage of this freer business environment, have spread their activities on a transnational and, indeed, increasingly global scale. We have not yet reached (and likely will never reach) the condition of a truly global market economy, where distance and boundaries dissolve into irrelevance. But production and consumption patterns are increasingly internationalized, creating new economic spaces that span multiple political geographies. Since the 1980s this emergence of transnational economic spaces has been largely driven by the organizational logic of corporate industrial networks and their financial relationships, which cut across national boundaries.
During the last decade, and particularly in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, this wholesale demolition of economic barriers has become more controversial, as transnational economic activity generates negative spillover effects that existing governance mechanisms have yet to effectively address. Less developed countries, in particular, are exposed to an ever-greater volatility and turbulence of global market forces, for which no equally global political framework provides shelter, order, and regulation. The postwar paradigm of "embedded liberalism" is no longer valid. Yet despite growing opposition, liberalization was given another push forward by the end of the Cold War, as Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union chose to abolish their command economies and as countries in Africa and elsewhere overhauled their highly protective import substitution programs.
This process of economic liberalization has been accompanied in many countries by a process of political liberalization, related to, but more often beset by conflict than, its economic counterpart. Since the mid-1980s many countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America have liberalized their domestic political systems, at times leading to the emergence of new sovereign states. The number of countries classified as electoral democracies by Freedom House increased from 69 in 1987 to 117 in 1998. This trend has had a number of important implications for the organization of governance in general and for notions of legitimacy and participation in public-policy-making in particular.
First, political liberalization has led in many countries to a proliferation of organizations of civil society and has, at the same time, enabled these organizations to form transnational alliances. According to the Yearbook of International Organizations, the number of international NGOs increased by more than 60% between 1981 and 1996. Some countries saw even more dramatic expansions. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it was not uncommon for the number of registered NGOs in a country to increase by as much as 400% within a decade. The trend was not limited to the developing world, however; countries like the United Kingdom and France also saw significant increases in the number of homegrown NGOs.
Second, with this growth and greater articulation of civil society, donor organizations have increasingly found it worthwhile to channel their support to their projects in developing countries through these NGOs, rather than through government agencies. In doing so, they see themselves as supporting democratization and assisting in the downsizing of overinflated state bureaucracies. It is estimated that NGOs disburse roughly 15% of all public development assistance worldwide and, in combination with other funding sources, deliver more than $10 billion (US currency throughout) worth of services and relief aid annually to the world's poorest people. International and local organizations of civil society have thus established direct relationships with donors in the industrialized world, and in turn the greater availability of donor funds to NGOs has inevitably contributed to the establishment of even more of these organizations. The result in many countries has been the emergence of a large civil-society sector with direct links to sources of international finance.
In similar fashion, the processes of political and economic liberalization have spurred the growth and reach of transnational corporations, which today account for a substantial share of economic activity in many countries. According to the UN's 1998 World Investment Report, in 1997 some 53 000 transnational companies controlled about 450 000 affiliated organizations worldwide. Sales of these companies amounted to $9.5 trillion in 1997, clearly outstripping all of world trade in that year. And just as international NGOs are heavily concentrated in the industrial countries, so, too, the overwhelming majority -- some 90% -- of transnational corporations are headquartered there.
The trend toward transnationalization of business activity and organization manifests itself in at least three ways. First, the rising incidence of cross-border mergers and acquisitions is a major driver of FDI flows and reflects companies' desire to divest noncore activities and build on their competitive advantages. Second, the growing significance of intrafirm trade reflects a restructuring of corporate activities, internalizing to the firm many cross-border economic activities that previously were conducted on the open market. Third, the number of interfirm alliances grew from fewer than 300 in the early 1980s to more than 600 in the mid-1990s. More than 8 200 interfirm agreements were concluded between 1980 and 1996.
These alliances mostly occur in high-technology and other knowledge-intensive industries, where firms join together in cross-national networks to share knowledge and information. These horizontal, interfirm networks allow the participating companies to source knowledge on a transnational scale and take advantage of economies of scale. Although the political significance of these transnational companies and their activities is still highly disputed, there can be no doubt that they play a very important role in economic development and have developed into key political players on the global stage.
In sum, countries have liberalized their political systems and economies and in the process allowed private actors -- individuals and organizations -- to play a greater role in determining public-policy outcomes. Civil society, NGOs, and businesses have come to play a greater role in economic development in many developing countries in recent years. Meanwhile, the successful liberalization of many domestic political systems has led to increased calls for the international system of governance to take a dose of the same medicine and to seek comparably constructive and fruitful ways to collaborate with business and civil society in global policy decisions.
The growth of national and transnational organizations of civil society has been especially important in increasing pressure on public institutions -- states and international organizations alike -- to open up and create new venues for access and political participation. At the domestic level, many of the traditional means (such as political parties) by which interests are aggregated and views conveyed to leaders have lost membership and public appeal. At the international level, organizations of civil society have emerged as important political players, successfully challenging international institutions to address their interests and concerns.
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
Whereas the processes of economic and political liberalization have figured prominently in the interdependence debate since the late 1960s, more recently they have been superseded in importance by an ongoing technological revolution that has significantly changed the world in which we live. Technological change has transformed the way in which information and knowledge are created, processed, and disseminated, and this poses some difficult challenges for public institutions.
Technological change is in itself neither a curse nor a cure-all. It does both good and ill, usually both at once. On the one hand, advances in communications technologies have improved governments' ability to process information and knowledge. The activities of states and international organizations are becoming better coordinated and may yet culminate in what one observer calls an "international governmental information marketplace." On the other hand, technology often evolves faster than the social and regulatory environment in which it is embedded. As a result, social, cultural, and economic relations become more intertwined and inherently difficult to predict or stabilize.
The information technology revolution in general and the Internet in particular are good examples. New information technologies have enabled or facilitated many types of cross-border activity, which sometimes intrude on a government's capability to control economic and social relations within its territory. The Internet has doubtless improved the ability of public institutions to communicate, to share critical information, and to organize political and bureaucratic processes in a more efficient way. It has also helped NGOs, whose reach was formerly limited to a single locality or country, build powerful transnational coalitions. Business, too, has benefited from the rapid development of the Internet, which has created a whole new medium through which commerce can be pursued and the geographic reach of companies can be extended. These benefits notwithstanding, however, the public sector's inability to regulate information technology effectively has also led to some unfortunate spillover effects from the Internet. For example, the international drug trade increasingly organizes its distribution and payment systems by means of sophisticated e-mail and website systems. The Internet is an ideal instrument for organizing money-laundering, especially as the introduction of so-called e-money makes control even more complicated. The Internet has also facilitated the spread and sale of illegal pornographic material throughout the world. The proliferation of computer viruses and hackers seeking to manipulate critical computer systems poses serious risks to both the public and the private domain, and the threat will only grow in the future.
Falling costs of communication and coordination, driven by the information revolution, facilitate bottom-up organizing processes that strengthen nonstate actors, including businesses and NGOs. Both corporations and civil society have taught the public sector a lesson on this score: by relying on horizontal and flat organizational structures, rather than traditional hierarchies, they have gained power relative to governments and intergovernmental organizations that continue to operate on hierarchical principles. Horizontally organized entities have a distinct advantage over hierarchical ones in processing information and making use of knowledge in innovative ways.
More fundamentally, the transformation in the way in which information and knowledge are created, processed, and disseminated has made it more difficult for policymakers to control, structure, and use information and knowledge. Information and knowledge have always been a currency of power. But as many private companies have already learned over the past decade, their value has appreciated dramatically. Public policy has only begun to come to grips with the changing context. Technological change and speed, as well as the transparency by which information is processed, have an increasingly important impact not only on how we organize our lives as individuals but ultimately on social relations and political institutions as well. Taking a longer-term perspective, there is little doubt that technological change and the information revolution will radically transform the framework conditions within which policy is made.
THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL IMPACTS OF LIBERALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
Although the implications of both technological change and liberalization can be felt at all levels of governance, as the discussion below demonstrates, the multiple dimensions of the problem are perhaps best seen at the global level.
The geographic dimension and the territoriality trap
It is now commonly accepted that with increasing social and economic integration, the geographic scope of public goods and bads extends far beyond national borders. For public-policymakers this has resulted in a dramatic information and knowledge gap between themselves and the nonstate social and economic networks that now span the globe. Governments struggle to respond to challenges about which they lack sufficient information and whose origin is far beyond their geographic reach (Box 1). Trapped by the territoriality of their power, they have little choice but to address the symptoms of public bads, rather than the causes. Nor are they likely, under present arrangements, to be able to preserve such public goods as health, a clean environment, and a safe and sound financial system in the future.

Box 1 Transnational collective action: the protection of the ozone layer From the early 1970s on, scientific advocates stated that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) damaged the ozone layer. Although the scientific hypothesis that CFCs threatened to deplete stratospheric ozone immediately received widespread attention in the United States, other countries did not recognize the research as valid. The Clean Air Act of 1977 in the United States curtailed CFC production there but did not result in a reduction of CFC output worldwide, as European companies simply inherited the markets their US counterparts had lost. In addition, developing countries were increasingly producing and using the compounds. CFC emission is a clear case of a global public bad, because many if not all countries around the world suffer its effects, at least in the long run, and because a successful response requires cooperation among a substantial number of countries, and especially the most important producers. Initial intergovernmental negotiations, however, failed to mobilize sufficient political support for the far-reaching measures so important for an effective worldwide reduction of CFC output. It took intensive lobbying by civil-society organizations, overwhelming scientific evidence, and some key events (in particular the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in 1986), as well as the cooperation of key members of the business community, to bring about action. In 1987, 13 years after scientists had first explored the damaging effects of CFCs, states agreed under the Montreal Protocol to reduce worldwide CFC production by half.
The time dimension and intergenerational equity
If geography presents one set of constraints for policymakers, time presents another. As already indicated, the information revolution has dramatically reduced the ability of policymakers to respond to the changed condition of politics. The time that policymakers need to process, structure, and use knowledge so as to make informed decisions has become a scarce commodity, as 24-h media coverage of events from all around the world exerts unrelenting pressure to act, or rather react, quickly. The result is "instant politics," where far-reaching decisions are often made on the first available information. NGOs are often catalysts in these processes, building national and transnational advocacy coalitions to push policymakers to act in response to humanitarian crises or environmental disasters as soon as they arise.
More importantly, hierarchical bureaucratic structures often altogether lack the crucial information and knowledge base from which to make timely and effective public-policy decisions. The sheer speed with which complex technological change occurs alters the framework conditions of politics. Think, for example, about financial regulation or transnational crime. What we often observe is a recurring cycle of politicians losing grip on events, momentarily catching up, then once again falling behind, as if caught on a high-tech treadmill, constantly struggling to adapt to ever-changing external conditions. The effort to regulate international financial markets is a prime example (Box 2).

Box 2 Financial markets and the regulatory dialectic Since the outbreak of the Latin American debt crisis, in 1982, the rising incidence of bank failure and growing systemic risk in the international financial system have become a matter of great concern for policymakers. In 1988, after enormous pressure from the United States, financial system regulators in the Group of Ten large industrial market economies agreed on the Basle Accord, which stipulates a one-size-fits-all capital adequacy standard for international banks. However, by the time the final agreement on capital adequacy was announced in the summer of 1988, new challenges to the stability of the global financial system were already looming. As US Federal Reserve Board chair, Alan Greenspan, recently stated, other "deficiencies were [becoming] understood even as the Accord was being crafted." The industry quickly developed new financial instruments and business practices (involving securitization and derivatives trading) that effectively circumvent the standards. In addition, the emergence of internationally active financial conglomerates, embracing a range of different financial sectors (such as commercial and investment banking, as well as insurance), makes regulation increasingly complicated. The resulting dynamic can be characterized as an ongoing regulatory dialectic. Every attempt on the part of public regulators to address dangers in the financial system is countered by rapid innovation by the financial services industry and the introduction of new financial instruments and business strategies. In this fast-changing environment, policymakers cannot react quickly enough to prevent gaps in regulatory coverage from emerging.
Perhaps most frustrating is the fact that even as the revolution in information technology has increased the premium on time, a growing number of public-policy issues -- notably those focusing on the environment -- require a perspective that spans generations. Decisions on environmental policy today will have implications for many generations to come. And it is far from clear whether a governance process driven by the political business cycle can cope with this gross mismatch between the time available for making decisions and the time over which our descendants will suffer the consequences (Box 3).

Box 3 Forests and intergenerational equity When it comes to the environment, our exploitative reach all too often exceeds our intellectual grasp. Tragically, much of the knowledge we need to gain a broader understanding of many environmental concerns and the complexity of ecosystems will only be acquired after our environment has been transformed and perhaps irreversibly damaged. This raises issues of intergenerational justice and equity, for knowledge about how to preserve ecosystems that have already been lost would be a bitter bequest to future generations. Deforestation is a perfect example. Forests play a critical role in serving human needs. They are a prime source of water, food, protein, shelter, medicine, fodder, lumber, and soil, and they often provide a basis for tourism as well. Forests also stabilize landscapes and influence water flows, water quality, and the composition of the atmosphere. They are major reservoirs of biodiversity in all latitudes and home to various groups of indigenous people as well. Yet almost half of the forests that once covered the Earth have been destroyed. Deforestation is occurring most rapidly in South America (especially the Amazon Basin), in Southeast Asia, and in Southern and Central Africa. An average of 15.4 million ha of forests of all types was lost each year during the 1980s -- an area the size of Peru and Ecuador combined. The ultimate effects of deforestation not only on global climate change but also on myriad local ecologies and societies are still unknown. The greenhouse effect may yet drastically alter the Earth's climate, crippling economic development in both the developing and the developed world. Future generations will be confronted with this mounting and complex problem and will have to bear the burden of previous generations' disregard and lack of awareness. Reforestation policies, along with a noticeable decrease in deforestation, would counter these effects, and international organizations are starting to answer the call. Funding of forestry preservation programs by the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and related agencies grew substantially during the past decade. But although this greater emphasis on forest protection on the part of international agencies is a step in the right direction, trisectoral participation that emphasizes an intergenerational perspective will be imperative for success. It is true that the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) and its successor, the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF), increasingly include other actors (NGOs and parts of the business community) in their consultation processes. So far, however, the IPF-IFF processes have failed to act as a forum for successful cooperation between actors from the various sectors and from Northern and Southern countries. Future forest management initiatives (such as the United Nations Forum on Forests) will have to strengthen both the trisectoral dimension and the link back to initiatives at the regional and local levels.
COMPLEXITY AND THE RISKS OF A PARTIAL VIEW
Even as they adjust to these ever more tightly binding constraints of geography and time, policymakers find themselves having to tackle more and more issues that cut across areas of bureaucratic or disciplinary expertise. Decisions made about international trade, for example, can have profound economic, ecological, and security effects, all of which must be considered in the policy debate. In essence, technological change and the information revolution have unleashed an increasing complexity on governance issues along two dimensions.
First, existing public-policy concerns are understood as increasingly difficult to define and as increasingly inseparable from other domains. Global policy decisions about the environment, as in the forests case discussed in Box 3, or about public health, such as how to control aids and malaria, have social, ecological, economic, and security repercussions, none of which can be simply ignored. This broadening of the problem domain challenges the knowledge and information base of national bureaucracies and their structures yet again.
Second, entirely new and complex problems have emerged that have not yet been fully understood. A case in point is the issue of how to pursue the potential benefits of genetic engineering for food security while minimizing the risks (Box 4). Because of the accelerating pace of technological change and the fact that states are increasingly linked into highly complex webs of political, social, economic, and environmental interdependencies, attempts to find feasible solutions for the world's problems need to be informed by systematic knowledge about the issue at hand, the circumstances, the relevant actors, and possible strategies. Getting the full picture becomes more and more of a problem for bureaucracies, not least because of the potential for myriad unintended consequences. The risk of a partial view, in turn, is growing higher and higher precisely because of the systemic consequences of decisions.

Box 4 Who will regulate genetic engineering? The successful manipulation of plant and animal genes to enhance a variety of agricultural products has rapidly accelerated since the mid-1980s. Most of the research and development has taken place in the industrialized world in the private sector. Large chemical companies and agribusiness firms have discovered that these genetic alterations can dramatically increase the output of products such as wheat, rice, and milk while increasing their nutritional value. Both the products and the technologies developed are subject to mechanisms to protect intellectual property rights, such as patents. Disputes over the safety of these products threaten to disrupt agricultural trade between the United States and Europe. Research and development of transgenic plants has focused on crops, cropping conditions, and markets of the industrialized countries and, to a lesser extent, of large-scale farms in higher income developing countries. About 75% of the area sown to transgenic crops is located in the United States and is mainly for maize, cotton, soybeans, and canola. Poor farmers and consumers in developing countries would stand to benefit from the use of genetic engineering to develop drought- and pest-tolerant varieties of locally consumed food crops, such as cassava, millet, sorghum, rice, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. There is also potential to enhance the nutritional value of the foods consumed by poor people, perhaps providing an important means to address micronutrient malnutrition, which affects more than 2 billion people worldwide. However, in the absence of broader public-sector involvement, little research and development that is relevant to poor farmers and consumers will occur, as the private sector does not expect an attractive return on such work. The regulation of transgenic crops involves many issues, including the following: · Biosafety -- to prevent environmental risks, such as loss of biodiversity, collateral harm to beneficial species, and the drift of various genetic traits from food crops to their wild and weedy relatives, creating "superweeds"; · Public health and food safety -- to prevent the transfer of allergens and carcinogens through genetic engineering; · The possibility of monopoly profits; and · Intellectual property rights -- to balance these against the right of farmers to save and replant seeds and the right of nations and communities to benefit equitably from their genetic resources. Some of these issues are both unresolved and controversial. Developing countries lack the administrative capacity to implement regulations, even after the need has been determined. Regulatory capacity is also weak at the global level, where there is a lack of common understanding of the potential risks and benefits of genetic engineering and no appropriate institutional framework in which regulation could be negotiated. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, on which 130 governments agreed in January 2000, is only a first step in the direction of regulating genetic engineering. There is also growing concern that genetically altered organisms present an unprecedented threat to the global environment and to the health of the world's population. Many scientists argue that the unregulated use of these items could unleash an uncontrollable genetic chain reaction that would irreversibly alter the composition of various species. Currently, no international standards regulate the use of these materials, and consumer awareness through the use of labeling has been successfully thwarted by the lobbying strength of various large companies. The situation is worsened by a lack of communication between the companies performing the research and development and the developing nations that perceive themselves as threatened. Even now, we lack a common understanding of the potentials and risks of genetic engineering. In his Millennium Report, the UN Secretary General calls for a global public policy network to address the risks and opportunities associated with the increased use of biotechnology and bioengineering.
Together, geography, time, and complexity have created an operational gap that, if it persists as a governance gap, will cast doubt on the feasibility of democratic institutions. It is already an important factor in the declining trust in these institutions, and it is one to which governments and international organizations must respond.
To the extent governments cannot close the operational gap, the effectiveness of democracy itself is threatened. Citizens may continue to exercise their right to vote, yet the actual power of that vote to shape public policy decreases with the decline of the government's capacity to govern effectively within its borders. The same holds at the global level: international organizations that can no longer fulfill their mandates will have increasing difficulty justifying their existence.
THE PARTICIPATORY GAP
Even as these problems related to geography, time, and complexity contribute to an operational gap in governance and put the legitimacy of our democratic institutions at risk, political liberalization and technological change are also fueling a participatory gap that looms ever wider. States and international organizations can no longer afford to bypass the concerns of transnational actors who have successfully politicized many global issues and have strengthened their bargaining positions with significant financial and ideological resources. For example, NGOs have been very successful in placing the distributional aspects of economic integration and technological change on the global agenda and keeping them there. Transnational corporations, likewise, are increasingly important players and have gained political leverage relative to states and international organizations.
Yet, existing institutional processes and structures of governance offer these forces few points of access and active participation in public-policy-making. The United Nations and the World Bank have each made informal efforts to include both civil society and the private sector, but these clearly fall short of a concerted approach to bringing all sectors together and therefore may even be counterproductive (see Chapter 5). The formal governance structures of intergovernmental institutions have not changed at all. As already indicated, there are no transmission mechanisms by which the interests of scattered stakeholders can be aggregated and fed into the global political process. There is no global public space in which substantive discussion of transnational challenges can effectively take place and be acted upon in an open and participatory fashion. In fact, as long as there is no democratically structured institutional context, the often-cited "power shift" does indeed remain a zero-sum game. Without that context, the enhanced governance role of businesses and civil society cannot be fully translated into democratic decisions that strengthen the legitimacy of states and international organizations, turning today's zero-sum game into a positive-sum game. Creating an institutional framework in which those interests can be adequately represented and integrated into public-policy-making defines the challenge that GPP networks are designed to address (see Chapter 3).
This concern about participatory forms of governance highlights another important point. A purely technocratic view of the management of globalization, relying on efficiency and effectiveness as the only benchmarks, would be overly simplistic and neglect the role of norms and values. It is possible to focus too narrowly on the theoretical issue of determining which goods are global public goods and thus within the domain of governments to provide. But such a focus overlooks the importance of the political process by which such goods come to be recognized and accepted as belonging in that domain. The regulation of the Internet, solutions to preserve the ozone layer, the control of transnational crime -- all these have a clear political dimension and thus should be subject to open debate, in which societal differences in norms and values can be expressed and taken into account. Economic, cultural, and social integration requires more than efficient technocratic management; the contentious issues it places on the transnational agenda can only be tackled by inclusive and legitimate political processes, which GPP networks can promote. Many of the cases surveyed as background for this report are telling examples.
Effectiveness and efficiency cannot be the only yardsticks in designing new governance mechanisms; legitimacy and inclusion are equally important, not only in terms of a Weltanschauung, but also from a strategic and political perspective. As the breakdown of the negotiations toward the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) made clear, nonstate actors have successfully reorganized themselves to build transnational coalitions, capable of challenging governance mechanisms they perceive as overly secret, undemocratic, or inequitable. And even if -- as some claim -- their arguments are faulty, only an open and inclusive debate might bring this to light. As the landmines movement and the Jubilee 2000 coalition have convincingly demonstrated, the failure of international organizations to address concerns based on such norms and values and to act as "norm entrepreneurs" (see Chapter 5) may pressure those public institutions to react, rather than encouraging them to act proactively.
STATES, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, AND THE IMPERATIVE OF CHANGE
States and international organizations thus face profound challenges to their continued ability to execute their mandates. They have yet to respond in a comprehensive and systematic fashion to the new, global economic environment that national and cross-border liberalization and deregulation have created, in a way that takes advantage of the benefits that these processes can bring. And all public institutions must learn how to keep up with the increasing pace of technological innovation and assess its implications for the structure and processes of information and knowledge creation, processing, and implementation as these relate to their own public-policy-making, both nationally and globally.
If the operational and participatory gaps described above are not at some point effectively addressed, the risk of a popular backlash against deeper social and economic integration becomes ever higher. In fact, grass-roots concerns about economic liberalization have already contributed to a massive slowdown in negotiations in this area over the last 10 years, especially with regard to international trade. For example, the Seattle Round of trade liberalization, launched in late 1999 despite widespread popular opposition, shows little prospect of major progress.
Conventional forms of international governance have so far been unable to fill these gaps. Their default has contributed to a growing legitimacy crisis for multilateralism in general, which in turn has fueled the backlash against globalization. For the multilateral institutions, responding in timely fashion to the challenges outlined above will be critical, not only for meeting their mission, but also for ensuring their continued legitimacy. An inadequate response may well jeopardize deeper integration, as governments, in particular, will have little choice but to fall back on territorial solutions to their governance challenges.
Fortunately, some of the same developments that pose such a daunting challenge to traditional governance mechanisms also offer the potential to help bridge both the operational and the participatory gaps. For example, the technological developments that make rapid information flows possible enable the kind of decentralized, nonhierarchical network structure needed to respond quickly and flexibly to a rapidly changing environment. With a mobilized global citizenry, monitoring can take place in a less centralized, more participatory manner, and increasing political liberalization can allow the monitors to become active on a transnational level. There is no guarantee, however, that governance mechanisms will emerge naturally just because the need and the raw materials are there. And the governance mechanisms that do emerge may fail to address critical issues of leadership, inclusion, and funding. Mindful of the opportunities -- and the risks -- of changes in governance structures and processes, the next two chapters focus on GPP networks as institutional innovations that can contribute to closing both the operational and the participatory gaps in governance.
Chapter 3. What Do Networks Do?
Document(s) 6 of 14

We begin this chapter with a short primer on the most basic attributes of GPP networks (a detailed theoretical analysis would go far beyond the scope of this report; see the bibliography for additional references). We then turn to a discussion, drawing on our case studies, of what we see as the six most important functions of GPP networks and how individual networks have or have not succeeded in executing those functions. It goes without saying that our classification of network activities into these six functions cannot do full justice to the full range of activities reported in the case studies, but it is useful in clarifying the most important issues.
The six functions of GPP networks are as follows:
· They contribute to establishing a global policy agenda, and then they offer mechanisms for developing a truly global public discourse in which to debate that agenda;
· They facilitate processes for negotiating and setting global standards;
· They help develop and disseminate knowledge that is crucial to addressing transnational challenges;
· They help create and deepen markets;
· They provide innovative mechanisms for implementing global agreements; and
· They address the participatory gap by creating inclusive processes that build trust and social capital in the global public space by furthering transnational and transsectoral discourse and interaction.
These functions are not mutually exclusive, to be sure. Many of the case studies reveal networks performing a number of these functions simultaneously.
A PRIMER ON NETWORKS
GPP networks include actors from different sectors. Ideally, they bring together the public sector (states and international public organizations), civil society (NGOs and the like), and the for-profit private sector (corporations, other businesses, and their associations). Indeed, a growing number of transnational challenges require this form of trisectoral collaboration. GPP networks emerged in the shadow of traditional multilateralism. As our cases show, many of them started out as innovative organizational and social experiments, responding to an ever more complex global policy environment, taking advantage of new opportunities for cooperation, and relying to differing degrees on the new medium provided by advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Most important, GPP networks developed as a means to bring together far-flung institutions and people who often remain separate and are sometimes opposed to each other but who realize that they depend on each other to reach their differing goals and agree to collaborate in a loose, self-governing structure.
It is important to understand that GPP networks are not just another attempt at organization-building. They are dynamic in both process and structure. They can perhaps best be understood in terms of a four-stage policy cycle:
· Agenda-setting involves raising awareness and pushing issues onto the global agenda;
· Negotiation involves the application of decision-making processes;
· Implementation entails translating the results of negotiations into action and developing or improving a willingness or capacity on the part of stakeholders to comply; and
· Policy reformulation and institutional learning reflect the extent to which built-in mechanisms facilitate learning and change in the network.
This report has refrained from developing a clear-cut typology of GPP networks. Their huge variety of form and development suggests that, to date, they have been situational and opportunistic in nature. This may indicate that a process of evolutionary selection is under way, at the end of which a few particularly successful forms of GPP network will prevail. However, it is too early to predict the course and outcome of this development.
It is important to note that participation of actors from the various sectors in GPP networks usually varies along the policy cycle, as our cases will show. For example, the participation of all major actors (governments, international organizations, the business sector, and civil society) may be indispensable at certain stages of the policy cycle, such as negotiation and implementation, depending on the potential for conflict involved. On the other hand, from a purely analytical perspective at least, the initial setting of agendas would not necessarily require multisector participation, and the empirical picture confirms this.
As indicated above, GPP networks are institutional innovations. But they build on ideas that have been well developed in other fields, such as Elinor Ostrom's idea of "co-production" in smaller local communities, and through research on networks at the national and, in Europe, regional levels. Complementarity of resources is the key to the success of networks. Networks do not merely aggregate resources, but are structured to take advantage of the fact that each participating sector brings different resources to the fore. A typical network (if there is such a thing) combines the voluntary energy and legitimacy of the civil-society sector with the financial muscle and interest of businesses and the enforcement and rule-making power and coordination and capacity-building skills of states and international organizations.
Networks create bridges that enable these various participants to exploit the synergies between these resources. They allow for the pooling of know-how and the exchange of experience. Collaboration in networks creates regularity and predictability in the participants' relationships, generating a feasible institutional framework for fruitful cooperation. Spanning socioeconomic, political, and cultural gaps, networks manage relationships that might otherwise degenerate into counterproductive confrontation, something we have seen too often in recent years with the growing presence of both business and civil society in the global policy arena.
GPP networks not only combine existing knowledge from different sources and backgrounds but also create new knowledge, as consensus emerges over often-contentious issues. This requires knowledge management of a sort that lies beyond the traditional meaning of the term. Relying on differences in knowledge and in opportunities for knowledge-gathering among stakeholders, GPP networks apply an open sourcing model already applied in the private sector and manage knowledge from the bottom up. This model of managing knowledge is far from perfect, but it is a considerable improvement, given that it involves all stakeholders.
An added feature of this form of knowledge management is that it ensures constant learning -- from both successes and failures. GPP networks are, in one important dimension, learning organizations, built on the diversity of their participants. Learning in the context of diversity takes advantage of what has been called the "strength of weak ties," making use of the knowledge and experience of participants from different social, cultural, and political backgrounds. But the ability of networks to innovate and learn depends heavily on the talent of network managers to keep these ties loose, but still close enough to be manageable -- as one observer put it, networks are exercises in structured informality.
GPP networks both respond to and take advantage of technological developments, as well as ongoing processes of international integration, both political and economic, that challenge traditional mechanisms of governance. Technological advances facilitate the rapid flow of information that makes the decentralized, flexible network structure possible. Political liberalization facilitates the transnational activity of nonstate participants. Nevertheless, collaboration in networks for global public-policy-making also requires adjustment on the part of both the network participants and the existing institutions in charge of public policy, that is, states and international organizations. This raises a number of critical issues with regard to institutional management, learning, and change, which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4; and specifically with regard to the United Nations, in Chapter 5. After all, there should be no doubt that global public-policy-making through collaborative networks is likely to challenge deeply entrenched political, economic, and bureaucratic interests. Policymakers and bureaucrats will surely try to patch up their organizations with new structures or transpose them to new functions, for as long as possible, but a more genuine overhaul of their governance structures and activities may be needed in the long run.
As we have noted, no systematic research on GPP networks has yet been undertaken. Many of the initiatives surveyed below are fairly young, and the enormous variety of networks we observe in the field suggests that no consistent pattern of network-building under specific circumstances and conditions has yet emerged. This situational and opportunistic character of networks in their present form poses limits to how much a report such as this one can actually deliver in terms of rigorous analysis, conclusions, and recommendations. As time goes by, however, more systematic lessons will surely be drawn. The following sections highlight the lessons learned thus far with respect to the six core functions that networks currently fulfill.
PLACING ISSUES ON THE GLOBAL AGENDA
To some degree, all GPP networks seek to place public-policy issues on the global agenda. The very fact that networks form around particular issues suggests a common view among the participants that these issues deserve further attention at the global level.
There is one set of networks, however, whose principal objective is to pressure states and international organizations to address specific policy issues. These networks, which Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink have labeled "transnational advocacy networks," have been the subject of a growing literature in the field of international politics. We can gain a deeper understanding of their origin and the role they play in global governance by putting this type of network into the broader perspective of GPP networks. Advocacy networks generally form between civil-society groups and individual states to lobby intergovernmental organizations, other states, and the business sector to adopt certain measures. These networks use a variety of methods to bring important issues to the forefront of the global policy-making agenda. Several basic lessons can be drawn from their experiences.
Strategic use of media and influential individuals
The first lesson is that the strategic use of the media and the involvement of influential individuals have been critical to the success of advocacy networks' efforts. In the case of the ICBL, a coalition of NGOs and governments of several medium-sized nations forced the landmines issue onto the global agenda. Their efforts led, in 1997, to the signing of the Ottawa Convention. The negotiation of an international treaty can often take 10-15 years, yet pressure from the landmines advocacy network forced governments to act more quickly on this issue. Campaign organizers made effective use of the media, circulating vivid images of the devastation caused by landmines, to raise awareness of the problem and arouse popular sentiment. The involvement of internationally recognized figures, most notably Diana, Princess of Wales, drew further attention and support, contributing to the ultimate success of the campaign.
Modeling itself after the landmines effort, the International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has worked through regional conferences and a core group of governments to raise the issue of children in the military on the list of global priorities. As in the landmines case, active engagement with the media has been important, as has the involvement of influential individuals. Key among these has been Graca Machel, whose 1996 report on the impact of armed conflict on children first raised widespread concern. The Coalition is now pushing for the adoption of an optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and as Stuart Maslen writes in his case study, "the search goes on for a famous personality that could champion the cause of children used and abused as soldiers."
The international debt-relief movement, led by Jubilee 2000, has similarly demonstrated media savvy in its advocacy efforts, as Elizabeth Donnelly demonstrates in her case study. Working through public figures as diverse as Pope John Paul ii and the rock star Bono, the network has attracted widespread attention and support while also generating some controversy.
Another network, Transparency International (TI), adopted a focused approach to the problem of bureaucratic corruption, which it articulated through both a normative framework and an argument based on economic efficiency. TI first succeeded in raising awareness of the complexity of the problem and in pushing the issue onto the agenda of international organizations, states, and affected industries. Although corruption has always been recognized as a problem, the relevant governance institutions, especially the international organizations, had not made it a high priority in their work. (The international organizations were restricted by their mandate from bringing the matter to the fore, but it is also true that their staffs were less than eager to push the issue.) TI therefore saw its task more as one of decrying the lack of open acknowledgment of the problem than as one of addressing a real lack of awareness.
This, of course, had consequences for the strategy that TI chose to make its case. As Fredrik Galtung remarks in his case study, a "single, blunt, blanketing awareness campaign" would not have yielded the desired response. Rather, TI would have to somehow crack the taboo around corruption, without alienating the very people on whom it would rely to make inroads into the problem. To win credibility and to position itself as a capable and powerful partner in cooperative anticorruption efforts, TI chose a two-track strategy. First, it raised awareness among the general public and used the media's interest in stories about corruption to push the issue onto the agenda of international organizations, states, and businesses (the group's annual Corruption Perceptions Index is a good example). Second, TI in many instances served as a policy consultant (for example to the World Bank), providing detailed and high-quality intelligence on issues related to corruption and how to tackle them. Although relying on the media, TI chose a less uncompromising advocacy approach in exchange for a mixture of keeping the issue of corruption on the agenda while trying to work with involved actors to find ways to address it. Having succeeded with its agenda-setting strategy, TI has since moved on to the perhaps more difficult challenge of forging, through its national chapters, what Peter Eigen calls "natural coalitions of change," involving a broad range of actors in the fight against corruption.
Help from advocacy networks
A second lesson that can be discerned is that advocacy networks can increase the prominence of issues that are already on the global agenda by articulating clear and focused goals, often justifying them on incontrovertible moral grounds. In two of the cases discussed above, networks focused their attention on narrow issues within a broader policy domain: landmines are a form of conventional weapon, and opposition to the use of child soldiers lies within a broader concern for children's rights. In each case, the failure of an earlier intergovernmental convention to adequately address the problem led advocates to push for a network approach, carving out of the broader problem a single issue with a simple and straightforward moral imperative. Had either group tried to address the issue area on a broader front, their efforts might have been blunted by controversy or a mismatch between their resources and the sheer scope of the problem. Instead, their choice of a specific focus attracted considerable support. The emphasis on normative arguments against the use of landmines and child soldiers also strengthened these networks, in part by depicting opponents' positions as morally indefensible. In similar fashion, the Rugmark Initiative (discussed in Chapter 4) sought to draw attention to the problem of child labour in the carpet industry as a microcosm of a broader social-standards and human-rights agenda.
In a similar manner, the Network on the Development of Guiding Principles for Displacement raised support for its program by using language and norms that had already been approved by states earlier in the process. As Simon Bagshaw writes in his case study, the "greater the number of co-sponsors and the broader the geographical representation, the politically less feasible it becomes for recalcitrant states to obstruct the process."
Support from unconventional partners
A third lesson is that advocacy networks can often frame issues in such a way as to attract support from unconventional partners. The Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief provides an interesting example. Early on in the campaign, organizers considered changing the campaign's name to Debt Relief 2000. Advertising consultants had cautioned that many people would be unaware that the original, biblical meaning of
jubilee
referred to a custom of periodic, wholesale debt forgiveness. But the network leaders decided to stick to the original name. And as it turned out, the jubilee concept became particularly important in attracting support from churches and religious people. By framing the issue in terms of religious norms, the network formed an improbable coalition between the left-leaning supporters already likely to be drawn to the cause and elements of the Christian right. In another case, Greenpeace framed discussions about global climate change as a hard-headed matter of risk management, rather than only as a soft-hearted matter of protecting fragile ecospheres. With this approach, it succeeded in attracting the banking and insurance industry to participate in the negotiations, as discussed below. How global networks frame public-policy issues can thus be an important element of best-practice networking.
Successful advocacy networks thus make strategic use of the media and influential individuals, articulate clear goals (often through a normative lens), and frame issues so as to have maximum impact. They create a transnational public discourse around policy issues that require a global approach. In many cases, networks that perform functions other than advocacy start in a similar fashion, that is, by placing issues prominently on the global agenda, before moving onto the other phases of the policy cycle. In cases such as the networks on landmines and the use of child soldiers, organizers plan to work on implementing international conventions on their issues once they have successfully lobbied for their adoption. The transnational linkages formed during the advocacy process will likely assist such networks as they move toward implementing policy solutions. More and more advocacy networks have realized that, to move beyond mere advocacy, they must reach out to, and collaborate with, sectors other than their own -- in particular the business community.
NEGOTIATING AND SETTING STANDARDS AND REGULATIONS
Setting transnational rules and standards is becoming ever more important as political and economic liberalization and technological change create transnational social and economic spheres of activity whose governance demands a global framework. More and more national and international bureaucracies have realized that negotiating and setting standards to address transnational problems differ from agenda-setting in their need to involve all the stakeholders, both because these stakeholders provide timely and complex knowledge and because their involvement gives legitimacy to the process. A growing number of standards and regulatory issues -- from financial regulation to environmental protection, from social standards to public health -- have become matters of transnational concern, and managing conflicting knowledge and achieving consensus on particular issues have become core functions of GPP networks. Such networks, as our cases show, are more likely to arise out of a crisis or stalemate, when those in conflict realize that no single group can resolve the issue by itself.
Two of our cases illustrate innovative approaches to negotiating and setting global norms and standards that contributed to closing both the operational and the participatory gaps described in Chapter 2. First, the case of the WCD shows how a truly global trisectoral network was key to overcoming stalemate in the highly controversial and complex policy arena of large-dam construction. Second, the case of the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) demonstrates how a network addressing a lack of adequate transnational labour standards was launched at the national level. A third case, that of ISO 14000, may not be an example of best-practice trisectoral standards-setting, but it provides valuable insight into this important function of networks. In a fourth case, the Network on the Development of Guiding Principles for Displacement, network participants focused on a variety of existing norms that had already been approved by many governments in a different human-rights context to rally widespread support for their initiative to negotiate standards for the treatment of internally displaced people. All four cases demonstrate the broad spectrum of issues for which standards-setting is critical, and they have in common the building of consensual knowledge, for which an inclusive approach and the casting of a broad knowledge net are key.
The World Commission on Dams
The case of the WCD demonstrates how an almost archetypical trisectoral network operating at the global level can contribute to building consensual knowledge and overcoming stalemate in a policy arena riven with conflict. The mandate of the WCD is to "undertake a global review of the development effectiveness of large dams and to develop internationally acceptable criteria and guidelines for future decision-making on dams" (Box 5). The network was designed to respond to the operational and participatory governance challenge of generating the institutional arrangements and decision-making processes needed so that dam-building can contribute to achieving sustainable development.

Box 5 The World Commission on Dams · The WCD was initiated jointly by opponents and advocates of large dams to review the effectiveness of dam construction for development and to explore alternatives for managing water resources; · It aims to develop international standards that will assist future decision-making about the planning, design, monitoring, and operation of dams; · It has a 2-year mandate that expires in June 2000; · Its charter emphasizes the goal of establishing an independent, transparent, knowledge-driven, and inclusive system that takes into account the interests of all stakeholders; · The organization's mandate and the choice of its commissioners were subject to open deliberation among representatives of all sectors; · The WCD provides for monitoring of its various initiatives through case studies, a review process, and various consultations at the regional level; · It has initiated 10 case studies, designed to collect data relevant to their country settings in Brazil, China, India, Norway, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe; · It has commissioned 17 thematic reviews, to have been completed in November 1999, that address social, environmental, economic, and institutional issues concerning water-resource management; · It will review a total of 150 dams worldwide through a cross-check survey that will ensure the accuracy of the case studies' conclusions; · It will undertake regional consultations in Africa, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia to increase stakeholder input and information exchange; · It established the WCD Forum, a 55-member committee that acts as a reference group and allows increased consultations among all sectors of society; · It accepts only financial contributions that are not tied to any single project but are spread across all sectors (to maintain the commission's independence and credibility); and · It has a total projected budget of about $8.5 million for the duration of the initiative. For more about the WCD, see www.dams.org on the Internet.
As Sanjeev Khagram demonstrates in his case study of the WCD, the growing complexity and politicization of large-dam construction and its social, economic, and environmental implications made this one of the most conflict-ridden issues in the development debate. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a breakdown of dialogue among NGOs, builders, and international organizations such as the World Bank, which had financed many large dam projects worldwide, led to a stalemate. This stalemate imposed considerable costs on all stakeholders: builders saw their income from dam construction decline dramatically; NGOs had to spend considerable resources to sustain public campaigns against large dams; and the World Bank, facing fierce public pressure, could no longer support any loans in this area. Bringing representatives from all relevant groups and sectors together in an independent trisectoral network to break the stalemate and to start to form a consensus on standards for large-dam construction was imperative. Their experience might hold important lessons for similar cases, such as the regulation of genetically modified organisms.
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. In the spring of 1997, the World Conservation Union (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources [IUCN]) and a small group of World Bank staff began an experimental dialogue that brought together both champions and critics of large dams. It took more than a year before the WCD was born, in the summer of 1998. Virtually every decision made in that interim was hotly contested, from the selection of a chairperson, to the number and composition of commission members, to the appropriate roles of the Bank, the IUCN, and other participating groups. However, the fact that these decisions were negotiated in an inclusive and participatory way, with no major interest excluded from the table, was critical to the ultimate establishment of the WCD.
One of the biggest challenges for the WCD was to bring the for-profit private sector on board. Operating in a highly competitive environment, private engineering and construction companies were much less accustomed than the other participants to engaging in collective action, beyond the usual lobbying. However, many followed the lead of Göran Lindahl, president of the multinational engineering firm abb, who understood early on that a trisectoral effort could lead to greater stability and predictability in the industry's business environment. Unfortunately, established professional associations, such as the International Commission on Large Dams, regarded the WCD as a rival, and only slowly was a measure of trust built up that allowed for meaningful cooperation and negotiation. And, in many cases, getting government approval for local reviews of large dam projects -- an integral part of the WCD's work program -- has been difficult, as some governments at first perceived the WCD as a biased intruder.
The case of the WCD also shows that truly trisectoral sourcing of knowledge is key for building consensual knowledge and closing the operational and participatory governance gaps. Inclusiveness, openness, and transparency are the key principles of the WCD. Its structure, process, and funding are all trisectoral (see Box 5). 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. If the WCD's work is successful, there will be a better understanding of the impact of large dams, and the trisectoral sourcing of this knowledge will have created a more participatory process around the issue. The local reviews of existing dam projects also involve local communities and will enable them to better understand the impact of large dams.
The time-boundedness of the commission's work (the WCD will dissolve in 2000, after 2 years in operation) is an important precondition for the success of the WCD to date. The participants made a commitment that the work program of the WCD would be completed within the specified period, after which the commission will cease to exist. Setting a time limit on the commission's activities ensures that the results will be useful to various stakeholders because of their timeliness, and it guarantees that the WCD will not degenerate into just another talk shop unable to admit its growing irrelevance.
The strictly trisectoral nature of the WCD has thus been critical for its success to date. In part, this is also because sharing funding responsibilities across all sectors has ensured its continued credibility (see
Chapter 4). A valuable lesson of this case is that the more conflict-ridden an issue area is, the more important the trisectoral nature of the endeavour becomes.
The Apparel Industry Partnership
Whereas the WCD is a truly global network, the AIP is an example of a network that addresses a similarly controversial transnational issue starting at the domestic level. The AIP brought together a group of US-based multinational companies, NGOs, and organized labour, through the initiative of the US government, to negotiate a voluntary code of conduct for multinational companies in the clothing industry (Box 6). This unilateral US initiative responded to an intergovernmental failure to address the growing complexity and geographic scope of labour-rights issues more generally. Although labour standards, especially the banning of child labour and sweatshops, have been on the agenda of international organizations for a long time, national and international regulatory efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The International Labour Organization (ILO) and other bodies have promoted these issues but have fallen short of eliminating these practices. It was this failure of international code-building efforts to construct meaningful instruments for enforcement that opened the door to nonstate initiatives to address labour standards.

Box 6 The Apparel Industry Partnership · The AIP was initiated in August 1996, after US President Bill Clinton brought leaders of the apparel and footwear industry, labour unions, consumer groups, and human-rights NGOs together to work to ensure that products are manufactured under decent and humane working conditions and to communicate that information to consumers; · It adopted, in April 1997, a code of conduct defining decent and humane working conditions and adopted principles for monitoring the code; · It established the Fair Labor Association, a not-for-profit organization, to develop an independent external monitoring system and appropriate consumer education mechanisms; · It has as its lead governmental actor the US Department of Labor, which has shown renewed vigour in promoting labour standards at home and abroad; · It includes as participants in the network 10 private companies and 1 business association; · It includes as participants 4 nonprofit human-rights and labour NGOs, although 1 religious NGO and 2 union representatives withdrew in November 1998; and · It has also been influenced by many actors outside the network, including student activist groups such as United Students Against Sweatshops, the socially responsible investor community, and religious groups. For more about the AIP, see the documents at www.laborrights.org/aip/index.html, made available on the Internet through the International Labor Rights Fund.
Responding to the failure of intergovernmental regulatory approaches and the need to bring business and civil society on board in a constructive fashion, the US Department of Labor suggested a US-based approach toward standards-setting, relying on voluntary, rather than top-down, hierarchical, regulation. At the time, this national approach also made sense because the huge number of actors worldwide affected by labour standards made coordination extremely difficult. It was clear that all US stakeholders needed to cooperate in order to abolish the offensive practices. It was also recognized that all efforts to eliminate sweatshops had to focus on continuously improving working conditions abroad. Of course, the initiative would have a cross-border impact, as, under the agreement, the overseas suppliers of US-based apparel firms are also supposed to open their production sites for monitoring. An international expansion of the network is also on the agenda, which will primarily involve drawing into the process multinationals not based in the United States.
The AIP case shows how hard it is to close the governance gap by developing labour standards for transnationally networked companies, even when starting out with a limited, national approach involving a small number of players. Not surprisingly, given that multinationals, organized labour, and NGOs were all at the table, the negotiations remained highly contentious throughout. Yet, US apparel companies had two major incentives to join the AIP. First, they wanted to avoid further public embarrassment, as well as economic losses arising from such debacles as the discovery of apparel sweatshops in El Monte, California. Second, they recognized that, in many cases, improving the conditions of labour would actually increase productivity and product quality. For the NGOs, the prospect of being able to arm-twist some apparel companies into recognizing their responsibilities to their workers and into coming to the negotiating table to join efforts to fight sweatshops was important in itself. In addition, the participation of some apparel companies in AIP drove a wedge between them and other companies that had not recognized their responsibilities to workers and consumers. This was something the NGOs could use as leverage, both to hold those firms in the AIP accountable to higher standards of behaviour and to pressure those outside the AIP to follow the example of the industry leaders. (For more on the exploitation of intrasectoral differences in networks, see
Chapter 4.)
AIP members found out early in their deliberations that achieving consensus on labour standards is extremely time-consuming and difficult. However, they also acknowledged that collaboration was key to the integrity and credibility of the resulting code and principles of monitoring and that it allowed some trust to be developed between NGOs and companies. The bargaining power of the various parties was more or less equal: the industry could rely on its superior financial resources, and the NGOs could rely on their "shaming" strategies, whereby they arranged for media exposure of scandalous corporate practices. This can best be seen, as David Bobrowsky argues in his case study, in the compromises worked out over what kind of monitoring the AIP would agree to and who would pay for it. Whereas the NGOs were keenly interested in establishing effective monitoring, the companies sought to avoid agreeing to independent external monitors. Despite the company representatives' assurances that internal monitoring would be sufficient, the NGOs stuck firmly to the principle of external monitoring, and ultimately they prevailed. After long and difficult negotiations that several times came close to breaking down, all parties agreed on a common set of standards and an external monitoring process. The participants agreed to set up the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an independent NGO tasked with handling the accreditation of independent monitors, certifying compliance with the AIP's code of conduct, and serving as a clearinghouse for information exchange and further negotiations.
Their successes to date notwithstanding, the challenges for the AIP and the FLA remain formidable. All participants have had to make compromises, which have led to complications within their own sectors. Indeed, organized labour eventually pulled out of the process, feeling that voluntary codes of conduct would not satisfy their demands. Within the NGO community, meanwhile, there are conflicts between radicals and moderates. The case of the AIP also shows that public backing that depends on the electoral cycle can severely hurt a network. Labour standards proved not to be an attractive campaign issue in upcoming elections, and the US government stopped pushing the issue. After initially using the partnership to generate good press, the government no longer gives the network the same level of public recognition. Furthermore, the number of participating companies is growing very slowly, partly because of the lessening of public governmental pressure and partly because of increasing competition in labels and codes of conduct from other companies and networks.
The case of the AIP shows that the move from the negotiation phase of the policy cycle to actual implementation is a critical one that carries substantial risks. Provided the implementation phase takes off, the next critical issue for the AIP will be to attract new members, especially from other countries, into the network. Indeed, although the national approach may have simplified the task of launching negotiations and the effective implementation of core labour standards (such as the ban on child labour), the network can only truly claim success once the codes have spread worldwide.
ISO 14000
Standards-setting through the ISO 14000 process is another example of a network-driven response to the growing complexity and geographic scope of global environmental issues. The ISO 14000 set of environmental management standards diverges from typical standards negotiated previously under the umbrella of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) in that it addresses issues that are recognized as having complex social and political implications.
In principle, the ISO's move to tackle new process standards is welcome. The organization has comparative advantage in standards-setting because of its long-standing experience and extensive knowledge in that field. The wealth of knowledge available to it and the broad participation of industry, often lacking in other standards-setting approaches, qualify the ISO as a platform for such negotiations. However, the ISO 14000 process also exemplifies a lack of built-in organizational learning mechanisms, given that the ISO has thus far failed to sufficiently transform itself to serve as an appropriate venue for process standards. To gain broad acceptance of standards, procedures of consultation and rule-setting have to be transparent, inclusive, and open. ISO standards-setting is usually long, complicated, and highly decentralized, as the detailed negotiations are carried out through technical committees, subcommittees, and working groups. These have typically been industry dominated, given that businesses usually set the agenda by proposing new product standards in the first place.
To many NGOs and developing countries, the standards-setting procedures applied under ISO 14000 appeared opaque and expensive, as Virginia Haufler points out in her case study. Many developing countries lack the capacity, in terms of both knowledge and financial resources, to attend the numerous meetings. Although some ISO delegations have sought to include NGOs in their deliberations, for many NGOs (especially smaller ones) the unfamiliarity with ISO processes and the lack of financial means have been barriers to effective participation. Many NGOs also regard ISO procedures with suspicion, viewing the process as dominated by business.
If the ISO is ever to become a lead forum in the setting of environmental management standards, it will have to adapt its internal procedures considerably to make the process more transparent. It will also have to engage in capacity-building to allow the meaningful participation of developing countries and NGOs. One way to begin thinking about this challenge is to look at the example of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which managed to transform itself from a purely intergovernmental organization into a more open forum that places a premium on capacity-building. (See "Implementing ideas and decisions," later in this chapter, and "Tackling the dual challenge of inclusion," in Chapter 4.) To be sure, the ISO has improved a lot in the process of hosting the negotiations for the ISO 14000 set of standards. The ISO Secretariat and others are launching more and more initiatives to increase capacity in developing countries, though it is too early to determine how effective these are. NGOs were able to move up the learning curve and are in some cases more effective partners today than they were a few years ago.
The case of environmental standards illustrates the confusion in the current regime of global standards-setting. There have been countless attempts -- local, national, regional, and global -- to regulate standards in various fields, such as the environment, labour, or human rights more broadly. Some, such as the AIP, have also been sector specific. When a labeling strategy aimed at influencing consumer behaviour accompanies voluntary standards and codes of conduct, the chaos resulting from the proliferation of diverse labels can cause a loss of confidence in the standards and regulations and thus a loss in their effectiveness. Although it is questionable whether a centralized global approach is needed in all cases, the time has come to consolidate these processes by sharing information and disseminating best practices and to focus activities on a few forums rather than many. One possible role of the United Nations and its specialized agencies could be to coordinate these efforts (see Chapter 5).
The Network on the Development of Guiding Principles for Displacement
At times, GPP networks must devise strategies to achieve their goals in the face of potential opposition from governments. In contrast to cases such as the ICBL and the International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, actors in the global Network on the Development of Guiding Principles for Displacement specifically chose not to lobby for a new international legal instrument. They recognized that the state-dominated process of ratifying a treaty or declaration would be too difficult, especially given the questions of sovereignty involved in the problem of people being displaced within their own countries. Instead, the network adopted the strategy of compiling existing international legal norms into a set of Guiding Principles for Displacement. By using language and norms that had already been ratified by governments and a mandate approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations, network managers sought to win support from a wide range of member states.
Through these strategies, the network was able to form a broad coalition of state support. As Simon Bagshaw shows, in the case of Mexico, the government continued to object because it saw this process as a form of standards-setting through the back door. Nevertheless, the network managed to get other states on board and to push the Guiding Principles through an approval process less complicated than a treaty ratification or declaration would have been. According to Bagshaw,
The key point to arise from the development of the Guiding Principles within a GPP framework is that the elaboration of an international treaty, giving rise to binding obligations for those states which sign and ratify it, is not necessarily a prerequisite for providing an effective normative framework.
As these four cases have shown, where issues are contentious, a participatory and inclusive approach, using open sourcing to pool knowledge, is imperative for producing effective and politically sustainable results. In addition, successful standards-setting does not end with agreement on a norm. Rather, it must proceed to implementation and compliance, which in turn require ownership of the process by those with a stake in the outcome. The case of the AIP has clearly shown that implementation may bring a new stage of conflict, with which the network must then come to terms.
DEVELOPING AND DISSEMINATING KNOWLEDGE
Developing and sharing knowledge are key to all networks, but some networks take specific advantage of the opportunities provided by technological change to enable people and institutions facing similar problems to develop, share, and disseminate knowledge on how best to address the challenges they face. Technology and the information revolution allow best practices and solutions to be shared with increasing ease and at ever-lower cost. CGIAR is an example of a network that exploits economies of scale in developing and sharing scientific knowledge on how best to address the food crisis in the developing world (Box 7). The Roll Back Malaria (RBM) initiative is a network dedicated to better coordination of public and private efforts in the fight against malaria (Box 8).

Box 7 The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research · CGIAR was established in 1971, as an informal network of international organizations, bilateral donor agencies, and private foundations, to support international agricultural research centres for developing countries; · It was stimulated by the success of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat in Mexico in making the green revolution possible through high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat; · It has a mission to contribute to food security and poverty eradication in developing countries through research, partnership, capacity-building, and policy support and to promote sustainable agricultural development based on the environmentally sound management of natural resources; · Currently, it has 58 donor members, including 22 developing or transitional economies, supporting 16 research centres with an operating budget of $350 million (the 5 top donors are the European Union, Japan, Switzerland, the United States, and the World Bank); · Through its research centres, it conducts research on food commodities, sustainable food-production systems, and food policy, and it works to build the capacity of national agricultural research systems; · It operates on a partnership basis with research institutions in developing and industrialized countries; · It works to ensure that benefits from its research are international public goods freely available for use in the public and private sectors; · Through research on commodities, production systems, and policy, it has had an important impact on food production and incomes in many Southern countries and, to a lesser extent, in the North (recently, it has devoted increased resources to impact assessment); · It pioneered the use of information technology for system management and stays abreast of best practices for collecting and disseminating information and stimulating interaction; · It helps to ensure biodiversity through the maintenance of collections at several centres that together make up the largest store of plant germplasm relevant to tropical and subtropical agriculture (these collections are held under the auspices of the FAO, with a policy of unrestricted availability [subject in recent years to the constraints of various international agreements]); and · In the 1990s, it established new structures to enhance the participation and influence of stakeholders, including national research systems in the South, civil society, and private business. Find out more about CGIAR at www.cgiar.org on the Internet.

Box 8 The Roll Back Malaria initiative · The RBM was launched jointly by the World Health Organization (who), the World Bank, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the UNDP in November 1998; · It involves international organizations, bilateral development agencies, businesses, NGOs, and the media; · It seeks to reduce mortality resulting from malaria by 50% by 2010 and by 75% by 2015; · It is designed to improve the general health system in countries where malaria is endemic by strengthening the various sectors of the health-care community, including the public health system, civil society, and private providers; · It has identified six strategic areas as key for malaria control and prevention: early detection, rapid treatment, preventive measures, improved coordination, a cohesive global movement, and improved research; · It has established partnerships with regional stakeholders, representatives of various sectors of society, industry partners, and the research community to ensure the proper use and distribution of resources; · It relies on a central team of 8-10 who staff members to coordinate its various activities; · Although RBM is not a financing instrument, it intends to support countries in their fight against malaria by giving them access to knowledge, technology, and financial resources through global partnerships; · It receives funds from who, the World Bank, UNICEF, and five bilateral donors: Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; and · It has a forecast budget of $25 million for 2000. Find out more about RBM at www.who.int/rbm/about.html on the Internet.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
One of the oldest public-policy networks, CGIAR relies on economies of scale to create and disseminate knowledge about high-yielding crop varieties, food-production systems, and food policies to help developing countries fight poverty and food insecurity. CGIAR is an alliance of 58 donors brought together by its cosponsors: the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Bank. It supports 16 international agricultural research centres. CGIAR's experience shows the importance of having a simple yet important goal, a clear focus and methodology for approaching that goal, and a flexible organizational structure for realizing it. Its informal structure (the group itself has no independent legal status, and secretariat and technical support are provided through the World Bank and the FAO) has fostered trust and commitment among the donors and centres.
In contrast to the ISO, CGIAR has changed its activities and adjusted its structure over time to take account of fresh challenges. The pace of change has been incremental over most of CGIAR's life, but it has accelerated in recent years. A Genetic Resources Policy Committee was established in 1994 to help deal with conflicting and controversial new international regulations on the ownership and use of plant germplasm. CGIAR currently spends around 9% of its resources on biotechnology research and is studying how its priorities and its structure may be affected by this powerful but controversial new set of instruments. These two fields, germplasm ownership and biotechnology, both involving issues of intellectual property rights, illustrate how a network established to disseminate consensual knowledge can be drawn into more contentious waters. In 1995, CGIAR set up advisory committees to improve two-way communication with NGOs and the private sector. And in 1996, it stimulated the creation of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) in response to criticisms that CGIAR was unnecessarily exclusive -- that it had neglected to give full weight to developing-country participation and to reach out to civil society in general. GFAR provides a venue where all stakeholders in the field of agricultural research can make their voices heard and propose initiatives to be considered in CGIAR and elsewhere.
CGIAR's experience also shows that the use and continual upgrading of information technology are critical for a network that deals primarily in research and the dissemination of results. This fact can be illustrated in many dimensions. According to one commentator,
In the past, indigenous knowledge about local varieties, farming techniques, and other local technologies tested through the generations rarely made its way to scientists who could incorporate it in their work. Now this knowledge, combined with new and classical scientific knowledge, is available worldwide.
Maurice Strong, who chaired the most recent system-wide review of CGIAR, described his vision of CGIAR's future role by saying that
New scientific developments have the potential to radically reshape the world's agriculture and food systems ... we need to recommit to science and research to ensure that the poor are not excluded, and that biodiversity and the environment are not undermined.
The Roll Back Malaria initiative
The RBM initiative is another network that creates, shares, and disseminates knowledge. It does so primarily through better coordination of previously existing initiatives in malaria control and by bringing both civil society and the business sector into the fight against malaria to a greater extent than before. This emphasis on sharing knowledge across sectors can serve as a model for many other GPP networks and is one the ISO could certainly learn from.
As Arjen van Ballegoyen shows in his case study, RBM's trisectoral approach builds on the lessons learned from a number of unsuccessful initiatives by the World Health Organization (WHO) to fight diseases endemic to developing countries, including malaria. By bringing together the available knowledge from all three sectors, the RBM initiative hopes to increase efficiency and efficacy and avoid duplication of effort in malaria control. The core organizations already had parts of their machinery working on malaria. However, communication between their staffs was extremely poor: people in the various organizations often did not know each other and sometimes did not even know that similar work was being done elsewhere. This was a problem not just at the transnational level, but even at the local level. Thus, one direct benefit derived from the meetings held so far under RBM's aegis is the simple fact that staff members of the various organizations have established contact with each other.
The RBM initiative shows that making full use of the differing comparative advantages of network participants is crucial for networks engaged in coordinating research activities. In the past, reliance on this principle had been limited by the lack of interagency communication, and this had led to agencies taking on tasks in which they had no particular advantage, or it led to tasks simply not being undertaken at all. The reapplication and strengthening of this principle -- that is, the switch to sector-wide approaches and the renewed requirement for communication across organizations and sectors -- will require a lot of learning and a change in organizational cultures. This will not be easy, and it will take time. If it succeeds, it will be because the process has been fueled from the bottom up, from the operational side, making use of the principle of open sourcing. It is on the operational side of the endeavour that people are meeting and working together creatively to solve problems, building trust that in turn will lead to a tighter knit community of researchers committed to the conquest of malaria.
The Urban Management Programme
The Urban Management Programme (UMP) is yet another effort to coordinate and exchange knowledge, in this case knowledge related to participatory urban governance, alleviation of urban poverty, and urban environmental management (Box 9). As demonstrated in Oluwemimo Oluwasola's case study, the UMP's trisectoral interaction takes place at the local level in the form of multisectoral city consultations. The network ensures the exchange of experiences gained at the local level, building a larger knowledge base from the bottom up. The network thus provides a structure through which cities in developing countries can learn from the development successes (and failures) of other urban areas within their regions and around the world.

Box 9 The Urban Management Programme · The UMP was initiated in 1986 to develop and apply knowledge in the fields of participatory urban governance, urban poverty alleviation, and urban environmental management; · It seeks to strengthen the contribution that cities and towns in developing countries make toward human development, participatory governance, social equity, economic efficiency, and poverty reduction; · It has regional offices in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, which respond to requests for assistance from local authorities, using resources provided by the participating stakeholders; · Through its local offices, it allows for substantive input through consultations on urban management issues, support for regional experts, and aid in global strategy formulation; · It uses action plans and consultations to provide information about policy guidelines at the city, country, regional, and global levels; · In 1999, it initiated City Development Strategies to define urban priorities, using analyses of individual cities, frequent consultations with mayors, and the participation of residents; · The UMP is administered at the global level by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS [Habitat]) in Nairobi; · It is organized as a partnership of the UNDP, the UNCHS, the World Bank, and the governments of the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom; and · It has a budget exceeding $4.5 million for 2000. Find out more about the UMP at www.hsd.ait.ac.th/ump/aua.html on the Internet.
Developing and sharing knowledge are prerequisites for the continuous cycle of learning and policy reformulation that underlies the functioning of all networks. All too often, networks are merely reactive, but if they take full advantage of the opportunities that the global information revolution offers, networks that develop, share, and disseminate knowledge can be truly proactive, as they can spread the lessons learned from failures as well as successes.
MAKING AND DEEPENING MARKETS
GPP networks can act as bridges between producers and buyers, borrowers and lenders, to make markets where they are lacking and to deepen markets where they are not fulfilling their potential. Left to their own devices, markets sometimes fail to produce certain goods whose provision would be in the broader public interest. This can be seen at the global as well as the local level. The fight against infectious diseases is one issue area where GPP networks are contributing to the creation of markets by helping to develop and distribute vaccines against diseases such as malaria. The microcredit industry is an area where networks are deepening markets, by extending the market for credit to the poor. By building bridges and expanding markets, GPP networks take advantage of technological change and new possibilities for cooperation.
The Medicines for Malaria Venture
The new Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV, now part of RBM) is a good example. The MMV was launched to solve the problem of private-sector underinvestment in vaccine research and production and thus to respond to a steady decrease in private involvement in malaria prevention and control since the 1960s (Box 10). The MMV seeks to create incentives for the development of new drugs and vaccines and thus to spur the development of new medicines that would otherwise never be brought to market.

Box 10 The Medicines for Malaria Venture · The MMV has set as its goal to secure the registration (every 5 years, on average) of one new antimalarial drug affordable to the worst-hit populations and capable of countering the growing resistance to existing vaccines (more than 1 million people still die from malaria each year); · It offers an effective solution to this health problem through a partnership between the pharmaceutical industry (with its expertise in drug development) and the public sector (with its knowledge of field studies and basic biological research); · It effectively acts as a bridge between academic institutions (which perform the basic research) and medical communities (which treat and control malaria); · It brought together inaugural partners from all sectors of society, including who, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations, the World Bank, the Government of the Netherlands, the UK Department for International Development, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Global Forum for Health Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the RBM partnership; · It is managed on a day-to-day basis by a management team, operationally independent of the donors, which fosters and coordinates the appropriation of MMV resources; · It expects to receive funds from governmental agencies, philanthropic donations, and foundations totaling $15 million a year by 2001 and $30 million a year soon thereafter; · If funding efforts are successful, it will make its first product commercially available before 2010; and · It is structured as an entrepreneurial, not-for-profit business venture that will funnel royalties from its products into a general fund to offset the need for future donations. For more about MMV visit www.mmv.org on the Internet.
The reasons that deterred major drug companies from getting involved in malaria research were purely economic. Research into malaria vaccines is a complex endeavour, and there is wide agreement that discovery of an effective vaccine will take at least another decade. This long and uncertain time horizon makes malaria vaccine research a very costly undertaking. Businesses contemplating entry have no assurance that they can recover their upfront costs. On the demand side, meanwhile, the purchasing power in the potential market for such a vaccine is small: most of the countries where malaria is endemic are poor. Hence, making a profit seems out of the question; breaking even may be the best anyone can hope for. Under these circumstances, the challenge for the MMV is to intervene in the market to try to change the dismal incentive structure facing potential vaccine producers, in the hope of reviving their interest and mobilizing them for a renewed push toward development and distribution of an effective vaccine.
Clearly, the malaria victims in developing countries are the ones who suffer most from this underinvestment. But overcoming this market failure is also in the interests of developed countries, given that some researchers expect to see the return of malaria to the United States and other developed countries in the coming decade.
With the MMV, a new NGO has been created in which industry and civil society can collaborate to ensure adequate funding for research. Contributors to the MMV include, among others, the Global Forum for Health Research, the Rockefeller Foundation, the SmithKline Beecham and Wellcome Trust, the UK Department for International Development, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations, and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries, as well as the World Bank. Research and development are funded primarily by the public sector and private foundations, thus creating a more predictable business environment for the pharmaceutical companies that have made a commitment to provide expertise and resources. However, any vaccine discoveries will be patented, and the owner of those patents will be the MMV. In turn, pharmaceutical companies will be allowed to market the products to low-income populations at affordable prices. A royalty income may go to the MMV on those products that earn significant returns for the organization's commercial partners. These returns will be fed back into the MMV's funds, to diminish the need for future donations. Through the new initiative, the private and public sectors aim to bring together the best of each other's strengths. By creating a market mechanism for the distribution of vaccines, the MMV contributes to RBM's ambitious goal of halving the global malaria burden by 2010. In addition, the MMV initiative highlights the fact that promoting GPP networks in these fields is an investment in a global health infrastructure, not just aid.
Networks for microlending
Trisectoral networks can also support the deepening of existing markets to include those who would otherwise not have access. Microlending networks are a case in point. Microlending -- the extension of small loans to poor individuals and small businesses -- is regarded as one of the most effective tools yet invented for combating poverty. Microlending networks bring together NGOs, the public sector (donor agencies and international organizations), and commercial banks to support such financing. As Anna Ohanyan describes in her case study, individual microcredit enterprises, which are often trisectoral in composition, are sustained through close linkages among a variety of actors, including states, central banks, commercial banks, local NGOs, and foundations. Although individual microlending initiatives are basically oriented to this one issue, they do more than deliver a financial service. They also generate sociopolitical outcomes, strengthen self-governance capacities at the local level (through the financing of educational programs and, in some cases, the delivery of health care), and empower the poor.
Although a global approach is by no means essential to make microlending work, the presence of economies of scale, the potential to share best practices, and reasons of simple efficiency make it the preferred approach from the perspective of international organizations and other supporters. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a network consisting of microlending practitioners and donor organizations, aims to support institutional development in microfinance and improve the quality of the industry's operations by supporting changes in donors' practices that will further improve the quality of their activities related to microfinance. The group also seeks to expand existing knowledge on how to maximize the outreach of microfinance institutions to the poor and how to upgrade the legal and regulatory framework in which such institutions operate. The commercialization of the industry, necessary to make it sustainable over time, is a medium- to long-term goal. Attracting the private sector into individual microlending networks is also needed to diversify the sources of funding.
The use of technology is central to microlending and its future development. Cost-effective e-mail communication between the industrial-country headquarters of microfinance institutions and their field offices in the developing world is of critical importance. The World Wide Web is increasingly used to manage knowledge and disseminate information on best practices. The Virtual Library on Microcredit (www.soc.titech.ac.jp/icm/) contains contact information about practitioners and donors, as well as academic articles and papers about microcredit. Using the World Wide Web to wire together a large number of microcredit groups around the world holds huge promise for advancing and extending the practice -- and for making it more attractive to commercial banks. Web-based initiatives such as PlaNet Finance (www.planetfinance.org) can help connect microfinance institutions all over the world, allowing them to share best practices and even to rate different initiatives according to their efficiency and effectiveness in serving the poor. This also involves capacity-building in terms of increasing access to the Internet. Using the World Wide Web to connect microlending organizations administratively can help reduce their processing and transactions costs and make microlending more attractive for mainstream commercial banks. Other networks would do well to take a close look at the ways in which microlending networks are taking advantage of the opportunities created by the information revolution.
IMPLEMENTING IDEAS AND DECISIONS
Implementation is a challenge for all networks at some point in their existence. Some GPP networks, however, are designed specifically as implementation mechanisms, typically for intergovernmental treaties that address transboundary problems. The GEF is an example of how the challenges of implementation can provide the momentum for broadening an established network from an intergovernmental to a multisectoral one, in order to effectively close the operational governance gap and deepen participation. The implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is another example where a trisectoral approach has proved key. Unlike with the GEF, however, for the CWC it is still an open question whether sufficiently strong mechanisms to allow the participation of all actors can be established.
The Global Environment Facility
Founded in 1991, the GEF is a hybrid organization, combining a conventional intergovernmental approach with an important network dimension (Box 11). It provides grants for projects in four focal areas: biological diversity, climate change, international waters, and ozone depletion. The GEF is also the financial transfer mechanism for both the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), and it provides the funds for economies in transition to meet their commitments under the Montreal Protocol. Since its pilot phase the GEF had been operating on the basis of a more traditional intergovernmental approach, but widespread dissatisfaction among developing countries and criticism by NGOs led to a readjustment of its governance structure in 1994. That restructuring also acknowledged a greater role for NGOs, creating a system of regional focal points to gather their input on the GEF and its council meetings and to disseminate related information on those meetings and on NGO consultations. Finally, the restructured GEF specifically identified NGOs and business entities, along with donors and governments, as eligible to prepare and execute GEF projects.

Box 11 The Global Environment Facility · The GEF was launched jointly by the UNDP, the UNEP, and the World Bank in 1991, as a financial mechanism to provide grants and other funds to recipient nations for projects and activities with the goal of environmental protection with a global focus; · It recognizes as key concerns four issue areas that transcend international borders: global climate change, biological diversity, ozone-layer depletion, and the pollution of water resources; · It actively involves NGOs in the execution and planning of more than 200 projects; · Through a small grants program (up to $50 000 for national projects and up to $250 000 for regional ones), it provides grass-roots groups with financial support to achieve their environmental goals; · It collaborates with private-sector representatives to provide additional financial and technical assistance; · It formulates policy through an assembly, a council, and a secretariat; · The assembly, which meets every 3 years to review GEF policies, includes representatives from all participating countries; · The council, the GEF's governing body, consists of 32 constituencies, which include representatives from all regions of the world; · The secretariat ensures the effectiveness of policy decisions, coordinates policy formulation, and oversees the implementation of approved programs; · Successful negotiation of institutional arrangements in 1994 resulted in a trust fund of more than $2 billion; · The GEF covers the cost difference (or increment) between a project undertaken with global environmental objectives in mind and an alternative project that the country would have implemented in the absence of global environmental concerns; · It offers funds to any nation that is eligible to borrow from the World Bank or that has the approval to receive technical grants from the UNDP; · It approved more than 116 projects worth $733 million in the pilot phase; and · It includes more than 35 nations as donors, with combined commitments in excess of $2.75 billion.Find out more about the GEF at www.gefweb.org on the Internet.
The business community has only gradually become involved in implementation, with activities ranging from strategic and policy advice on GEF-funded projects to technical input and studies. Several projects engage private firms, industries, and their associations in one or more components. For example, some climate-change projects funded by the GEF involve participation of energy service companies in the delivery and maintenance of electric power systems. The lessons learned from the GEF implementation network can serve as a useful resource for the implementation of other treaties in the global environmental arena (see Chapter 5).
The Chemical Weapons Convention
The CWC (Box 12) is another example of an intergovernmental treaty for which a trisectoral mode of implementation is important. But unlike the GEF, where the focus is on project-financing and capacity-building, a trisectoral approach is indispensable as an in-built knowledge-management mechanism to ensure that the CWC machinery is keeping up with scientific advances and technological change in the chemicals industry. As Emmanuelle Tuerlings and Julian Robinson point out in their case study, the public sector alone cannot be charged with the sourcing of information on scientific advances. National authorities have more than enough to do to simply discharge their routine duties within the control schedules. They may not always have the time or the capabilities to look beyond the schedules into what is happening in the research laboratories.

Box 12 The Chemical Weapons Convention · The CWC prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer, and use of chemical weapons; · It was opened for signature in January 1993 and entered into force in April 1997; · It is the first disarmament agreement negotiated in a multilateral framework that provides for the elimination of an entire category of weapons under universal international control; · It is also a network formally initiated by representatives of the public sector, including the military, the intelligence community, and nations that supported the improvement of relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union; · Private-sector representatives were encouraged to assist in the network because of the possibility of increased costs, further regulation, and damage from public outcry; · Stakeholders in civil society such as NGOs and scientists have played a key role in bringing new information and ideas about chemical weapons control to the public sector; · The Pugwash Conferences, an annual gathering of scientists concerned with the development of weapons of mass destruction, has acted as the most important civil catalyst for the CWC; · The structure of the Pugwash Conferences offers selected individuals (advisers to governments, experts in the academic field, and others) an opportunity to express their views in a confidential and informal setting; · Pugwash resulted in the inclusion of research institutions such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden and the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City in the United States, which produced a succession of papers that were then transmitted to various disarmament delegations. Guidelines for on-site inspections were established with the joint cooperation of research institutions and several representatives from the private sector. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has a budget of $65 million for 2000.For more about the CWC visit www.opcw.nl on the Internet.
Responding to this problem, CWC members established both an International Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) and advisory bodies for their national authorities. The membership of these advisory bodies, on which a heavy burden has been laid by default, is not drawn solely or even mainly from the public sector. It is drawn also from business and civil society: the chemical industry, universities, and the professional community. Indeed, a number of the individuals concerned also belong to Pugwash, an international movement of concerned scientists. Ideally, these national advisory boards and ISAB would form a central part of a CWC implementation network. Unfortunately, however, the participation of civil-society actors is seriously curtailed by provisions in the treaty that prescribe secrecy and confidentiality. Because a balance has to be found between transparency and confidentiality, a mechanism is also needed to give civil society sufficient access to relevant information. If the balance is skewed toward confidentiality, civil society will not have access to relevant information and a trisectoral implementation network will not be able to develop around the CWC.
CLOSING THE PARTICIPATORY GAP
Although the cases described thus far include some where trisectoral global networks provide what economists refer to as global public goods, they go far beyond just delivering a product. Following established practice in domestic public policy, GPP networks also engage in a process of determining what is or is not in the broader global public interest. Within this process, networks raise the profile of an issue to the point where addressing it comes to be considered in the global public interest. Networks also typically go on to explore options for meeting that interest in the most efficient, effective, and participatory manner. Recognition of this process dimension of networks leads us to a broader discussion of the informal and intangible outcomes that trisectoral networks often generate.
By initiating a transnational policy discourse, GPP networks respond to the participatory gap in international decision-making. Successful GPP networks facilitate social interaction among people and organizations that in many cases had almost exclusively been working against each other. To use Robert Putnam's terminology, networks of "civic engagement" allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved by fostering norms of generalized reciprocity and the emergence of trust, building what one might call global social capital. The notion of global social capital points to the possibility that GPP networks may, at least in the medium or long term, help in creating such trust across national boundaries. In so doing they would facilitate the formation of social capital, not only within societies and single sectors, but also across societies, which is critical for constituting a global public space.
This is a crucial precondition not just for consensus-building and cooperation but also for the functioning of markets. In many cases, the initiation of GPP networks, such as the WCD, turns out to be an investment in social capital that, despite some initial costs, pays off in the long run. As described above, the WCD negotiation process was jointly initiated by the World Bank and the IUCN. With no early guarantee of success, the two organizations funded the first step of the WCD process, the conference in Gland, Switzerland. This was an investment in a long-term process that was widely regarded as very difficult and unpromising. It soon turned out, however, that the careful initiation of a trisectoral approach was generating rewards: it was creating a sense of trust and reciprocal understanding among the various sectors, paving the way for later agreement. Whether the trust thereby created will be sufficient to see the organization through the later implementation phase remains to be seen, however. Interestingly, the participatory approach chosen for the process of setting standards for large-dam construction was diffused to the regional and local levels: the WCD initiated a series of regional hearings and case studies on dam construction and offered a multisectoral approach for doing this. In this way the WCD introduced transparent and stakeholder-oriented decision-making processes at the local, regional, and national levels that may well be replicated in other public-policy domains.
An example of underinvestment in a policy process and in social capital is the failure of the mai, as Katia Tieleman argues in her case study. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as the international organization sponsoring the investment treaty, simply did not get the process right. NGOs felt left out of the process, and business was not sufficiently interested or motivated to participate. After initial criticism of the secretive and exclusionary negotiation process, the OECD responded by doing too little, too late. As opposition to the treaty grew, every prospect for reconciliation and cooperation between the OECD and civil-society organizations was shattered, thanks to tone-deaf public officials and overly radical NGOs. This episode demonstrates that getting the process right is a critical precondition for making policy processes inclusive, legitimate, and sustainable.
TI, whose experience was discussed above, is an example of a network that succeeded in building trust between various sectors and in enabling actors to learn. Corruption was widely regarded, at least until the mid-1990s, as a topic that was "too hot to handle." States as well as international organizations either studiously ignored its existence or neglected to take the steps needed to counter it. In fact, some countries, developed and developing alike, provided (and in many cases still provide) incentives for corruption by offering tax breaks to their corporations that bribe foreign officials. However, since the early 1990s corruption has come to be increasingly understood as a major impediment to development, governance, and the legitimacy of democratic institutions.
It was TI that successfully placed the issue of corruption on the global agenda and on the agendas of many individual countries as well. TI was also able to forge national and trisectoral coalitions to work against corruption -- a process that presupposes a substantial amount of trust between the various participants. As Fredrik Galtung remarks in his case study, TI serves as a "bridging alliance between such unlikely parties as the World Bank and women's groups in Ugandan villages, and the OECD countries and investigative journalists in Russia." TI chose a nonadversarial strategy that eschewed investigation and exposure of corrupt practices and instead focused on cooperation, encouragement, consultation, education, and personal influence. TI accumulates and harbours high-quality knowledge and expertise on issues related to corruption. This expertise, combined with the high credibility of TI's leadership, has contributed to the emergence of relationships based on trust between TI itself, businesses, states, and international organizations. In forging these trisectoral coalitions, TI not only works against corruption but also engages in capacity-building, by enabling local communities, especially in developing countries, to take democratic control over their destinies. Specifically, TI supplies instruments for such learning, for instance its Integrity Pact or the mutually agreed upon Code of Conduct. The fight against corruption, although having quite tangible outcomes, thus also generates intangible gains, such as greater learning in local communities, firms, and bureaucracies. In the course of its work, TI has also built up a very good reputation for itself, and the coalitions against corruption it has initiated and sponsored have contributed to the creation of trust between the very diverse actors in this sensitive issue area.
Intangible outcomes should not be overlooked when measuring the performance of networks and evaluating their outputs. They are critical to sustaining globalization, for they ensure that a growing number of public-policy decisions are embedded in frameworks in which the most basic elements of participatory governance are present. These functions of GPP networks deserve more attention, because "getting the process right" is of crucial importance for the ultimate success of public-policy-making.
As this chapter has shown, GPP networks can perform a wide variety of functions, both confronting the challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities outlined in Chapter 2. Some critical issues have already been highlighted, for example, the significance of intangible outcomes, as well as the importance of regular review mechanisms and clear and focused goals. The next chapter will explore these lessons in more detail and present a set of critically important issues for successful network management.
Chapter 4. Network Management
Document(s) 7 of 14

What does it take to make networks tick? There are no simple recipes. As the previous chapter demonstrated, networks appear to be situational and opportunistic, and network dynamics cannot be managed mechanistically. Networks do, however, respond to management that emphasizes skilful social entrepreneurship, internal flexibility, and the ability to learn fast. One can distil some further general lessons about how best to manage a network process. But network managers first need to understand that it is seldom they that need to develop the solutions that their networks seek -- more often, it is the stakeholders themselves. Rather, the goal of a network manager is to manage the tensions and conflicts that inevitably arise from a committed search for solutions to real problems, and it is up to the network manager to do this in a constructive manner that keeps participants engaged. Although the list is by no means exhaustive, crucial management issues include the following:
· Getting the network off the ground through leadership and the creation of a common vision;
· Balancing adequate consultation and goal delivery;
· Securing sustainable funding (because money talks);
· Maintaining the "structure" in structured informality;
· Finding allies outside one's sector; and
· Tackling the dual challenge of inclusion (North-South and local-global).
GETTING THE NETWORK OFF THE GROUND
Both individual and institutional leadership are central to getting a network up and running. Through the power of their vision, social entrepreneurs can bring the relevant actors together and persuade them to throw their weight behind an issue. The chair of the WCD, Kadar Asmal, contributed greatly to enhancing the respectability and legitimacy of that organization. Asmal offered impeccable moral credentials: one World Bank manager described him as "an individual with courage, commitment, and moral authority." Although Asmal was not immune to criticism from various stakeholders, his expertise and experience muted any efforts to block his selection for the chair, and his leadership proved crucial in getting the various sectors together.
The leadership role played by US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in initiating the AIP went beyond that of a policy entrepreneur seizing on an issue at a crucial juncture. Reich acted as an agent provocateur, goading the apparel industry into negotiations with NGOs and organized labour. During those negotiations, members of the socially responsible investment community and religious leaders played a significant role by raising the public profile of the sweatshop issue and thus helping to keep pressure on the apparel companies. But without Reich's energy or the endorsement of the White House, the AIP's efforts would have lacked credibility. Given the US domestic political environment at the time, it was clear that the partnership could only go forward as a voluntary effort between business and the NGOs. The US government therefore limited its role to that of facilitator and cheerleader, but Reich took on that role with gusto.
The success of the negotiation of the Ottawa Convention cannot be separated from the leadership demonstrated by Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and by Jody Williams, coordinator of the ICBL. Perceiving the stalemate in the formal UN process to revise the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Axworthy jump-started a new process with a very simple and clear objective: to get a treaty for a comprehensive ban on landmines signed within 14 months. For her part, Williams made a critical contribution by keeping the international campaign focused and maintaining a constant flow of information among its members.
Often, institutional leadership complements and sustains the efforts of individuals. In the case of the RBM initiative, WHO exercised institutional leadership to get the network off the ground. This case also illustrates that leadership does not come on the cheap -- it requires internal adjustment and change on the part of the lead institution and its collaborators. Institutional leadership also requires committed individuals at the top, such as Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director of WHO. Having provided the initial leadership and initiative to bring researchers and existing networks on malaria eradication together, WHO remains an important actor in the RBM network. Among other tasks, it is charged with providing strategic direction for the network and serving as a catalyst for action, working to build and sustain country and global partnerships, and ensuring that all aspects of RBM's activities are appropriately monitored.
Although actual implementation has not yet started, the biggest problem facing the RBM network in general and its leadership in particular is the transformation of its organizational culture away from one based on vertical (push) initiatives toward one relying on sector-wide (pull) approaches. The problem of moving beyond business as usual is encountered not only in organizations like WHO but also in individual donor countries and their organizations and in the malaria-affected countries themselves. The success of the RBM initiative will depend on whether WHO can transform itself from within and educate other actors. It remains to be seen whether WHO will be able to continue playing the role of leader of RBM while transforming itself into a team player in a GPP network. The sustainability of the network will also depend on whether or not WHO tries to usurp the credit for possible success.
Leadership has to focus on getting the network dynamics right from the start. Two issues are of utmost importance: getting the right people on board and creating a common vision. Selecting the right mix and number of participants for the early meetings is crucial because they can work as "multipliers," attracting other interested parties to come on board. The WCD Forum, for example, is a group of about 60 representatives from the most important stakeholder groups and organizations in the WCD. It acts as a sounding board for the WCD process but also as a networking mechanism in itself. It is a crucial vehicle for the outreach activities of the commission and for mobilizing other actors that are not formal participants of the WCD process but still may have a strong interest in the commission's work. The WCD Forum will also most likely play a crucial role in disseminating the results of the WCD's work and in helping to execute follow-up activities. Its experience shows that it is important to have representatives of the most important groups and sectors on board but that it is also essential not to expand the number of participants too quickly.
Network leaders also have to make sure that participants realize that they depend on each other to solve the problem and must think innovatively about how best to address the challenge at hand. A "vision exercise" at the beginning of the process may be essential for developing common goals. The experience of both the WCD and the Global Water Partnership (GWP) (Box 13) underlines this point. Both networks started out with informal workshops in which participants were able to formulate goals free from the pressures of the usual institutional environment. These exercises are often a crucial tool for the development of trust between participants who previously had been working against each other or at cross-purposes. They can only succeed, however, if participants are willing to question their own well-trodden ways of thinking -- they have to "leave their institutional boxes," as one experienced networker put it. This is how one creates the social "glue" that makes actors work together on an ongoing basis, engendering the sense of ownership and commitment that help to sustain the network.

Box 13 The Global Water Partnership · The GWP was initiated in the aftermath of two 1992 conferences, on water and the environment (in Dublin and Rio de Janeiro, respectively), where participants identified the need to coordinate efforts in the management and development of water resources; · It brings together international organizations, local businesses, and NGOs to foster innovative and, especially, participatory forms of governance in water management; · It is an informal institution with a regionally self-reliant system that emphasizes the participation of leading stakeholders within the regions; · It encourages participants to use the network's resources to acquire information about the experiences and needs of other parties; · It provides strategic assistance in an informal, self-reliant way through regional technical advisory committees; · It involves its committees in the creation of regional institutions, policy formulation and analysis, and long-term capacity-building; · It includes as donors Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the UNDP, and the World Bank; and · It has a projected budget of $9.04 million for 2000. Find out more about the GWP at www.gwpforum.org on the Internet.
Of course, vision exercises are no panacea for managing the often dissonant expectations of participants. The case of the GWP shows that, after the initial meetings, these differences in expectations persist. Some see the network as an action mechanism, others as a mere forum for information exchange. Some favour a facilitating role; others, a hard-core financing role. Some favour thematic priorities; others, regional priorities. Managing these diverse expectations is key to the network's success -- and an important challenge for its leadership.
Leadership, individual and institutional alike, can even turn into a liability if a network becomes too closely tied to a single individual or institution. Once the network has passed the initial hurdles and established itself as a leading voice in raising awareness on a global issue, its social entrepreneurs must be ready to share their power in the network as they recruit vital constituents from all three sectors. This form of "leading from behind" has also proved successful in other institutional contexts. By acting as convenors and providing seed money, the IUCN and the World Bank acted as the main drivers in the early stages of the WCD, only to withdraw from their central role later. Thus, the roles of individuals and organizations in a network can change over time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that both the IUCN and the World Bank will be actively involved in the implementation of standards developed through the WCD process.
BALANCING ADEQUATE CONSULTATION AND GOAL DELIVERY
A central challenge that all participants in networks face is how best to combine balanced consultation with timely delivery on the network's objectives. On the one hand, networks by their nonhierarchical nature thrive on extensive but time-consuming consultation processes. On the other hand, network participants are under pressure from their constituencies to deliver results. Every network has to find ways of getting the process right while still getting the product out the door.
It is important to allow for extensive consultations, especially in the start-up phase of a network. Once a decision to launch a network has been made, establishing its legitimacy requires broad and representative inclusion, and this comes at the risk of delay in making decisions. A focus on process management must adroitly manage expectations. Network sponsors, observers, and critics alike must be reminded that it is not just the tangible outcomes that are important. Intangible outcomes also matter, as does the process by which both kinds of outcomes are achieved. Indeed the "right" process is an important precondition for any tangible outcomes to materialize. That said, however, there is always a danger of getting trapped in the process. A talk shop that fails to generate visible benefits within a set time frame will not last long. That is why networks must establish clear and measurable objectives on a preset timetable, even if some of those objectives seem insignificant or set up as "easy wins."
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) used what the organization calls milestones to monitor its progress and keep the network focused (Box 14). GAVI has a very broad mandate: to fulfill the right of every child to be protected against vaccine-preventable diseases. This mission requires a bold and sustained institutional effort, for which a trisectoral network that brings together international organizations, civil society, and private industry seems well suited. However, as we have already seen, networks do have comparatively high start-up costs and seldom produce immediate results. This may both alienate donors and put partnerships at risk, as over time participants lose sight of the specific goals. Clearly defined milestones are thus crucial for sustaining long-term support from donors and keeping all participants on board. They keep the network participants focused on the short- and medium-term operational goals of the network, and they provide proof to donors that the network is producing tangible outcomes and is not getting trapped in process.

Box 14 The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization · GAVI seeks to improve access to immunization services, promote vaccination as an integral part of public health systems, and accelerate the development of new vaccines; · It receives guidance from a governing board of several international stakeholders, developing-country delegates, representatives of the business community, bilateral agencies, and other associates, who jointly determine objectives and strategies; · It has set up three task-force teams, of limited duration, to address global immunization issues: · Through its country-coordination task force, it identifies best practices for establishing organizational systems and pilot programs within selected countries, · Through its advocacy task force, it articulates a common vision among member agencies and the global immunization community, and · Through its task force on financing, it identifies affordable strategies to improve the vaccination capabilities of the world's poorest nations; · It is run by a small secretariat, based at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which implements the decisions of the governing board; and · It receives funding from UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank, the path-cvp and Bill and Melinda Gates Children's Vaccine Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations, and other organizations (each partner contributes $300 000 to the budget each year). Visit the UNICEF webpage at www.unicef.org on the Internet to learn more about GAVI and related initiatives.
Moreover, by selecting interim goals that are "easy wins," networks can deliver results fairly early on and thus gain legitimacy with their constituencies (especially their financiers). In the case of the GWP, an easy success in a cooperation project in Africa fostered the network's legitimacy. If no easy win can be identified, other strategies for generating early results must be adopted. One such strategy is to focus, first, on narrow, specific, and technical dimensions of a larger problem domain. Delivering early results supports the reputation of a network, giving it breathing room to run in parallel the more time-consuming consultative processes that will deliver important intangible outcomes and create the trust that is a critical precondition for eventual success.
SECURING SUSTAINABLE FUNDING
How a network obtains its financial support is vital for its credibility and sustainability. Although seed money for a network can come from a single source, trisectoral financial support can be important when the network's primary purpose is consensus-building. To preserve its credibility, the WCD distributes its funding responsibilities among government agencies, multilateral organizations, and business associations, as well as NGOs and foundations. More important, no single donor from any sector contributes more than 10% of the group's budget. This rule has proved crucial for ensuring the WCD's independence, but it comes at a cost: fund-raising is much more difficult when one must accumulate a number of fairly small contributions. The time and resources that the WCD had to devote to fund-raising initially hampered its capacity to do its broader work.
Truly trisectoral funding arrangements can be less important for networks whose primary purpose is implementation. The GEF, for example, whose legitimacy is linked to formal intergovernmental treaties, is financed mainly by a single source: governments. It has only slowly expanded its sources of funding to include the private sector. Given the less conflictual nature of the GEF process, a trisectoral funding arrangement is of less importance. To take another example, CGIAR is financed primarily by the contributions of members, which include states, foundations, and international organizations. As Curtis Farrar shows in his case study, industrial countries (specifically, the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD) account for more than two-thirds of CGIAR financing. Membership in CGIAR is open to nonprofit entities that accept its goals and agree to contribute resources of at least $500 000. CGIAR recognizes private companies as stakeholders but does not accept them as members because of the potential for perceived conflicts of interest. CGIAR research centres, however, welcome contributions of funds from this source.
Rugmark, an international program to combat and prevent the use of child labour in carpet-making in South Asia, provides a good example of an innovative approach to financing a network. The initiative includes independent, external, on-site production-monitoring of carpet producers; carpets may display the Rugmark label if they are certified as having been produced without child labour. Monitors are hired and trained by the Rugmark Foundation. Carpet producers applying for a licence bind themselves to not employing children under 14 years of age and to paying general wages according to local legal minimum-wage requirements. Family producers have to prove that their children go to school. Carpet-producing companies have to provide the Foundation with full information about their production sites, which are then regularly inspected by full-time inspectors. European and American importers of labeled carpets pay 1% of the import value of the carpet. The funds generated through the sale of Rugmark-labeled carpets are in turn channeled into programs providing social rehabilitation and education for children in the affected regions. This is done to avoid pressing former child weavers back into illegal employment and to provide them with a minimum education. Regular reports are issued on the use of these funds. Transparency of funding is essential to ensuring the network's accountability.
It is also critical that funding be sustained for at least a few years -- a difficult task, especially for trisectoral networks that evolve around consensus-building. After all, the real strength and value added of these networks rest on the fact that they do not claim to offer a solution at their inception but provide an environment for stakeholders to develop solutions. Thus, apart from such intangible outcomes as trust, many networks cannot and should not guarantee success. But this "no-guarantees" approach exposes the providers of funding to financial risk. One way to reduce that risk is to establish a strict time limit for the initiative. As discussed in Chapter 3, the WCD has done just that: the organization is set to dissolve in June 2000. Another, less restrictive approach could establish an independent external review that assesses the accomplishments of the network after a given period of time and makes recommendations for further action. The GEF is one network that has changed its setup considerably following the recommendations of an external review (see below).
MAINTAINING THE "STRUCTURE" IN STRUCTURED INFORMALITY
The right institutional setup is critical to ensure that networks keep their "structured informality" and are able to deliver what they promise. Networks have to avoid falling into the trap of becoming just another institution. This means they must avoid building up bureaucracies and must put rigorous review processes in place. Successful networks build on existing institutions to the extent possible and limit their own secretariats to a minimum. This is a lesson learned from the secretariat of the hiv-aids network. During the 1980s that organization developed largely into an agency of its own, and this invited participating agencies and partners to ease up on their own efforts, knowing they could rely on the services of the secretariat. The GAVI Secretariat, in contrast, restricts its activities to pure coordination and minimizing competition for operational activities, by allowing partners to choose their areas of engagement according to their own relative strength.
Built-in review processes are critical to preserving a network's character as a learning organization and to preventing ossification of structures, practices, and people. In addition to permanent internal review processes (for example, comparing achievements against goals and milestones set earlier), regular external reviews are essential. The GEF has gone through two extensive, independent review processes, both of which made important suggestions for restructuring the institution. These reviews are critical because, as one GEF official put it, "We don't know what the road looks like, what the drivers and roadblocks will be, [so] it is important to have an evolving flexible partnership." CGIAR has also carried out three system-wide reviews and other cross-cutting studies. Yet, important as such reviews are, equally important is allowing for learning on a day-to-day basis, and this means keeping networks open to an exchange of views and receptive to outside opinions.
FINDING ALLIES OUTSIDE ONE'S SECTOR
To move network processes forward, it is often useful to look for alliances across the three sectors. Sectors, after all, are not monolithic, and sometimes intrasectoral divides create opportunities for innovative intersectoral networking.
Greenpeace's initiative in the case of the UNFCCC exemplifies how drawing in new actors can make a crucial difference to the public-policy-making process. As Paul Hohnen argues in his case study, Greenpeace was able to achieve a coup in international climate-change negotiations by engaging private insurance companies and motivating them to speak out. For Greenpeace, seeking allies in the business community was important, because the group needed their expertise to speak more authoritatively on the risks of global warming, using independent analysis of the potential costs of climate change. Some insurance companies had already started evaluating the impact of climate change and assessing the risks for their business; hence, they were suitable partners for Greenpeace in the climate-change debate. Some major insurance companies had come to understand the danger that climate change posed for their business, and some of their independent research studies confirmed the findings of Greenpeace and others on the sources and effects of climate change. Soon a number of the largest insurance companies started to take a public profile on the issue, calling for governments to take "urgent and dramatic measures."
To what extent the influence of the insurance industry was a determining factor in the final decisions made at the Kyoto negotiations remains unclear. Although it might not have had more than a catalytic effect, there is no doubt that Greenpeace's strategy of seeking unlikely allies from various sectors helped to spur a slow negotiation process and build a broader coalition for change. By bringing in the insurance industry, Greenpeace was able to tip the balance of power within the negotiations by exploiting intrasectoral differences between the fossil-fuel and insurance industries.
As in the case of Greenpeace and the insurance industry, with the AIP, intrasectoral differences have played an important role in moving the agenda. At first sight, the AIP is an unlikely alliance. Why did certain parts of the business community and certain parts of civil society (most notably, NGOs and, initially, the labour unions) decide to collaborate on the issue of sweatshops, whereas others stayed away? First, although parts of the apparel industry were clearly reluctant to go public and acknowledge that sweatshops are a problem, others saw the initiative as a welcome opportunity to improve their public image or show that they already had implemented far-reaching improvements in working conditions. Second, within civil society, organized labour and some NGOs were unenthusiastic from the start about setting voluntary codes of conduct and networking with the business community. By choosing to collaborate with some influential but less sceptical NGOs, the US government and the participating business community were able to forge new coalitions, which later drew in other participants from these sectors as well. Currently, the AIP is about to enter its implementation phase, where it faces some critical new challenges, as discussed in Chapter 3. Although it seems premature to speculate about the AIP's future, some of the lessons learned from other networks that have successfully managed the transition from negotiation to implementation may be instructive for the key players. The lessons learned about sustained leadership and network management, discussed above, may prove particularly relevant.
Intrasectoral divisions can also be exploited in the public domain, as the landmines case demonstrates. In the early phase, the Ottawa process was a de facto alliance among certain governments, the ICBL, and certain UN agencies. As Ann Peters argues in her case study, dissatisfaction over the limitations of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, together with the results of a review conference 15 years later, led to a "division among governments on the issue of a comprehensive ban on anti-personnel weapons and fostered firmer links between particular governments and non-governmental organizations." This alliance managed to marginalize obstructionist governments and move the process forward from a stalemated intergovernmental process at the United Nations.
The moderate wing of the debt-relief movement has also explicitly sought allies outside its own sector. What started as an advocacy coalition among NGOs and church groups has developed into a loose network of civil-society, intergovernmental, and state actors. There have been explicit attempts by activists to dialogue with officials of creditor and debtor governments and the international financial institutions (IFIs), and similarly these officials have initiated meetings with civil-society groups. Moderate Group of Seven leaders and IFI officials have expressed limited support for Jubilee 2000 campaign demands. As a result, these actors have been brought into the broader network of debate, if not consensus, on the issue. Although some network actors continue to view government and IFI officials as targets, many are starting to think of them as partners in the effort to relieve the debt of many poor countries.
TACKLING THE DUAL CHALLENGE OF INCLUSION
Although often described as global, most public-policy networks are in fact dominated by elite actors (public and private) from the industrial world, with few ties to developing-country groups or local institutions. Many networks exist in a wholly global space, made up of intergovernmental bodies, multinational corporations, and transnational "mega-NGOs." Within each sector, divisions exist between these bodies, mostly headquartered in developed countries, and their local counterparts, especially those in developing countries. The ability of networks to achieve their long-term goals, however, is influenced by their willingness and capacity to involve such counterparts. These two dimensions -- North versus South, and local versus global -- constitute the dual challenge of inclusion.
After discussing the importance of inclusion for networking processes, this section presents various strategies that networks have employed to address the inclusion challenge. "Local" here is conceptualized broadly to include all civil-society organizations, businesses, and governments that are not global in their orientation; in other words, local organizations for the purposes of this report are those that are territorially bound in any way. National, state, and provincial governments fall within this category, as do nontransnational businesses and many grass-roots NGOs.
The level of involvement of local and developing-country participants in networks can vary throughout the policy cycle. Many networks seek to address issues of particular concern in developing countries (such as malaria, landmines, debt relief, and microlending), and so they rely on data and information gathered in those countries during the initiation stage. Later on, however, the local suppliers of this information are generally excluded from the policy negotiation stage because they are assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be represented by their governments or by elements of civil society. As a result, many networks do not seek widespread participation by local actors until many of the most difficult decisions have already been made. Often, the only reason for bringing local actors back in is to make sure that the policies chosen can be implemented on the ground.
This limited participation by local and developing-country actors has led to criticism of the global public-policy-making process. Critics blame networks for trying to impose developed-country norms and values on developing countries. A recent editorial in the South Centre's newsletter, for example, charged that networks, particularly those focused on economic issues, are being used to extend capitalist domination abroad. In this context, the debt-relief movement has been divided between reformists and radicals over whether donors should require market-focused economic reforms for poor countries to become eligible. Representatives of both viewpoints can be found in both the North and the South, although the more radical voices are stronger in developing countries. Similarly, networks are criticized for trying to impose global norms within the field of human rights. Although opponents often invoke cultural arguments simply as a way to resist change, their claims do raise questions as to whether global norms actually exist in some issue areas.
Critics also sometimes accuse networks dominated by industrial countries of seeking to prevent developing countries from developing. In the CWC negotiations, for example, developing countries worried that the industrial countries would limit technology transfers to the developing world because the dual-use nature of some sensitive technologies (that is, their ability to be used in weapons as well as for peaceful purposes) posed a security threat. Consensus was ultimately achieved by including in the accord a passage acknowledging the economic and technological development needs of these countries.
Finally, and this is related to the previous point, networks are sometimes accused of trying to enforce double standards. Many environmental efforts have been criticized for unfairly imposing costs on developing countries when it is the industrialized countries that have been the main contributors to the problem. Think, for example, of the debate surrounding the ban of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a group of chemicals that contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer. As Reiner Grundmann describes in his case study, some countries, such as China and India, saw the Montreal Protocol, to regulate the reduction of CFCs, as inequitable and refused to sign. Although their own CFC production at that time was minimal, under the protocol it was assumed that China and India would absorb 30% of total world production by 2000. Both countries demanded adequate financial support and clearly defined access to alternative technologies before they would sign the protocol (see below).
Why inclusion matters
Inclusion of diverse groups in a networking process is important for several reasons. First, the active participation of local and developing-country actors gives legitimacy to global policies and demonstrates that those policies have not been derived in a global vacuum but reflect real concerns on the ground. As we have already seen, networks that lack such inclusion are often subjected to sharp criticism. Accusations that networks impose industrial-country values, prevent development, and enforce double standards all serve to question the legitimacy of both the process and its outcomes. As long as there are vocal people making such charges, the "global" nature of the network in question will remain in doubt. In addition, the extent to which networks are somehow accountable to public opinion depends on the nature of these links with local groups in countries around the world. Inclusion therefore fosters both network legitimacy and accountability by allowing more people to have a say in shaping policy outcomes.
As Timothy Sisk writes in his case study,
One of the principal lessons learned from the democracy promotion field is that local actors need to be more fully and systematically included in the GPP network if external assistance for democracy promotion is to be more successful.
Local participation brings legitimacy to the process, particularly in issue areas where global networks may be viewed as interventionist or seen as a source of interference in internal affairs.
Second, public-policy decisions, however global in their reach, ultimately must be implemented on the ground. Local people and institutions must therefore be on board right from the start if they are to be expected to carry out network goals and sustain them over the long term. As we know from the recent debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid, the success of a project depends upon securing the commitment of stakeholders to implement it. A sense of local ownership also increases the likelihood that policies will be sustainable after the donors have gone home. Success in networks responds to the same logic. This commitment can be achieved by encouraging stakeholders to take ownership of the network through participation in all stages of the policy cycle, from planning through to implementation. The example of forest management shows how crucial the inclusion of local actors is, especially during the implementation stage. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) and its successor, the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF), have so far failed to establish a link back to the local level. As Astrid Harnisch demonstrates in her case study, this lack of implementation at the regional and local levels is a prime cause for the problems and insufficiencies of the IPF-IFF process.
Third, inclusion is important from a normative perspective. The premise behind the network approach is that many GPP issues can no longer be addressed through conventional structures, such as intergovernmental organizations. Just as people in countries around the world are demanding a voice in their domestic policy-making processes, so, too, are they seeking to be heard when policy decisions require a global approach. Ultimately, the new institutions of global governance will be sustainable over the long run only if they foster venues for participation and democratic decision-making. This of course is not just a normative question but also a very practical one.
Finally, although we have seen that the operational and normative justifications for broad-based inclusion are compelling, there may be times when widespread participation in a network is not necessary. Certain scientific research networks, for example, seek to keep their work as focused and objective as possible by limiting the involvement of nonscientists. CGIAR has received funding from a wide range of sources and welcomes a broad group of stakeholders, but one of the pillars of its structure is to keep the core network activity -- agricultural research -- in the control of independent centres where scientists have a predominant role in management. There might be situations where inclusion and in-depth deliberation are redundant, simply because the issues involved are not as controversial as, say, those in labour standards. Nevertheless, even networks in these less contentious areas have to maintain an open governance structure and ensure sufficient transparency, just in case new issues of a more conflictual nature are someday put on their agenda. In the case of CGIAR, this point has current relevance: the genetic modification of foodstuffs has already become an important topic on CGIAR's agenda and will certainly trigger a contentious debate. In addition, as Chapter 2 has shown, some older issues might give rise to new conflicts as scientific advances reveal previously unknown side effects or linkages. Therefore, governance structures need to remain flexible and open to accommodate such increasing complexity in knowledge and perceptions.
There are other cases where the inclusion of local groups, at least in the early stages of a network, could actually be risky for those groups. Activism on issues such as internal displacement and the use of child soldiers may threaten many governments. For this reason, the network on internal displacement sought first to develop guiding principles at the global level before seeking local partners. The International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers followed a similar track and provided external legitimacy for action by local groups that would otherwise have been risky.
Strategies for inclusion
A review of the networks analyzed for this report reveals a variety of strategies for including both local and developing-country groups. Some of these strategies have been successful, whereas others have not.
Defining and pursuing multiple levels of engagement
Several networks have sought to incorporate views and opinions from developing countries and local interested parties by bringing the networks closer to them. They have established methods of consultation at the regional, national, and provincial levels. One way this has been done is by establishing national-level organizations whose negotiations and deliberations feed into the global network. The ICBL, for example, served as a communication hub for diverse local NGOs, government officials, and civil-society organizations to become involved in the effort to lobby governments for passage of the Ottawa Convention. It was the combination of pressure from national groups in particular countries drawing their governments' attention to the issue, pressure from several key individuals within the ICBL working on the international level, and country-to-country pressure that accounted for the ultimate success of the landmines campaign.
National delegations also participate in the ISO 14000 negotiations on environmental standards. These delegations have increasingly sought to include local civil-society organizations in their deliberations, with varying success. In some cases, NGOs have not wanted to become involved in a process that is perceived as dominated by industry. The ISO 14000 process has also been less successful at including developing countries, especially those that do not have national standards associations. The involvement of both local and developing-country participants has been hindered by their limited financial and organizational capacity, a problem discussed below.
Another way in which networks have pursued multiple levels of engagement is by holding regional and local consultations during the initiation and negotiation phases. Both the landmines campaign and the International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, for example, held a series of regional conferences at which governments, international organizations, and representatives of civil society were invited to discuss problems and develop regionally appropriate solutions. Organizers emphasized the importance of not reducing the conferences to "coalitions of the like-minded," and the organizers used them as a way to exchange information gathered through in-depth research. In each case, the regional conferences led ultimately to an international meeting at which information and proposals from the regional level were compiled and further negotiated.
The WCD also actively solicited stakeholder views and perspectives through regional consultations and submissions. In addition, the commission initiated a series of local-level research activities: 10 in-depth basin and national case studies, a larger survey of 150 dams around the world, and 17 thematic reviews of cross-cutting issues. The engagement of the network at multiple levels is intended to develop a comprehensive knowledge base, gather ideas from a range of participants, and incorporate stakeholders into the process itself; all of these are deemed crucial to the group's ultimate success.
Finally, some networks conduct their activities at multiple levels, from the local to the global. The informal Global Network for Democracy Promotion has found that a multilayered approach is key to forcing political transition in countries where that is needed. The network features actors from the global level (international donors, UN agencies) to the local level (citizens' groups, in-country activists) that work in formal and informal partnerships on a case-by-case basis. They share resources, knowledge, and experiences from other countries to pressure governments to undergo processes of political liberalization. Although there has been a series of celebrated successes in such countries as El Salvador, Poland, and South Africa, the Global Network for Democracy Promotion has so far failed to bring about true transitions in places like Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, and Burundi.
Similarly, the main function of the UMP is to facilitate city consultations in urban areas around the world. Its process is discussed further below, but it is mentioned here as yet another illustration of bringing networks closer to local and developing-country actors so that they can become more involved.
Establishing structures that institutionalize inclusion
Another strategy through which global networks address the challenge of inclusion, particularly of developing countries, is by institutionalizing their participation in network structures. The GEF, for example, has developed a method of representation that is a creative hybrid of the voting systems used in the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank) and the United Nations. The system was developed after the GEF's pilot phase, during which a more traditional Bretton Woods-style system of representation was used. The GEF council today comprises representatives from 14 OECD countries, 16 developing countries, and 2 economies in transition. For any measure to pass, it must be approved by votes representing 60% of the countries and 60% of the organization's financial resources. This system gives developing countries greater representation and more power than they have in the Bretton Woods institutions but allows donors more control than they would have through a UN-style, one-country-one-vote mechanism.
Developing countries had little involvement in the establishment of the Montreal Protocol. Some of them took little interest in the process, as both the production of, and the scientific research on, CFCs originated in the industrialized world, and others refused to participate because they saw the process as inequitable. Developing-country participation vastly increased, however, after the establishment of a funding mechanism, known as the Multilateral Fund (MLF), to aid poorer countries in the transition to CFC-free technologies. The MLF is administered by an independent body and managed by a 14-member executive committee, whose representation is split equally between industrial- and developing-country parties to the protocol. This arrangement aims at an equitable distribution of power between rich and poor countries, although donor countries maintain a veto right. In the end, it seems that reductions in emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals in many developing countries were achieved largely through market mechanisms, rather than through the work of the MLF. Nevertheless, the fund was a symbolic victory for the developing world, which helped win global support for the Montreal Protocol (Box 15).

Box 15 The Montreal Protocol · The Montreal Protocol was reached in September 1987 with a compromise agreement setting the goal of a 50% cut in production of ozone-depleting substances by 1999; · Network participants who were proponents of regulation included scientist advocates, staff members of government agencies and international organizations, and environmental activists; · Network members who opposed regulation included (in the 1970s) CFC producers and sceptical scientists and (in the early 1980s) officials of the Reagan administration, the European Community, Japan, and the former Soviet Union; · Discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in 1985 changed the perception of the problem; · The debate was further profoundly affected in 1986, when the Du Pont company, the leading opponent of international standards, perceived regulations as being inevitable; · Du Pont changed its position for fear that too obstinate a position might ruin the company's reputation and lead to consumer boycotts; · Opponents of regulations were also influenced by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 and by a policy shift in the German government that influenced several key nations in the European Community; · The Montreal Protocol institutionalized a formal structure, with the annual conference of the parties as the highest decision-making body, and with several other governing bodies, including a secretariat, as well as technical, scientific, and socioeconomic working groups; and · According to the UNEP, world production of CFCs was cut by half in the period from 1986 to 1992. For a copy of the provisions outlined in the Montreal Protocol, see www.unep.org/ozone/mont_t.htm on the Internet.
In their efforts to institutionalize inclusion, however, networks have to avoid superfluous and rigid governance structures and at the same time integrate a large number of participants from different sectors. As Charlotte Streck writes in her case study on the GEF, the sheer number of actors and agencies involved in that organization led to an overly complicated project cycle and lengthy decision processes. This made it extremely difficult to maintain a structured informality, which is one of the greatest advantages of any network.
Building on existing initiatives and approaches from the bottom up
GPP networks can also address the dual challenge of inclusion by building on existing efforts at the local level and in developing countries. Several networks have emerged out of grass-roots movements in the developing world. The nascent global network for microcredit, for example, has been building on the experiences and structures of local microlending institutions around the world, the most famous of which is the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Similarly, the Rugmark Initiative emerged out of local efforts in South Asia to combat the problem of child labour in rug production. Collaboration with industrial-country partners ultimately led to a system of labeling through which rugs produced without the use of child labour could be identified and marketed.
Opponents of the practice of female genital mutilation have also adopted a grass-roots approach in recent years. After top-down efforts were met with strong criticism for allegedly imposing Western cultural values, industrial-country activists sought to build a network through local groups (including many women's organizations) that were already fighting the practice on the ground. Through this combination of forces, cultural leaders in several communities have been persuaded to ban female genital mutilation.
The RBM initiative also seeks to build on local-level initiatives. Countries where malaria is endemic (primarily in the developing world) are encouraged to develop solid proposals for addressing the problem. During this planning phase, the global network provides countries with the information (and in some cases the guidance) they need to make informed decisions. The resulting country plans are forwarded to international organizations, which are supposed to assist in their implementation. The premise of this sector-wide, client-driven approach is that countries should set their own priorities. Rather than building on vertical initiatives, RBM relies on plans developed at the local level to combat the problem of malaria more effectively.
Adapting global policies to local realities
We have seen how global networks can be built from the bottom up as a way of including a wider array of local and developing-country perspectives. But sometimes the opposite strategy works well: some networks have developed flexible approaches at the global level, which can then be adapted and shaped to fit local realities.
This has been the strategy of the UMP, which supports city consultations in developing countries around the world. This network, based out of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) in Nairobi, operates through regional offices in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. These regional offices have identified several so-called anchoring institutions -- NGOs that identify and work with local partner institutions to facilitate the consultation process. The consultations themselves bring together representatives of the business community, civil society, and government agencies to address urban development problems. This approach has also allowed for the inclusion of traditional cultural authorities, who are often overlooked in other networks. All these stakeholders are prepared through a series of miniconsultations, which introduce program objectives, brief the stakeholders on their roles, and seek to convey local ownership of the process. During the consultation itself, participants concentrate on exchanging information, identifying symbiotic relationships, brainstorming, and selecting a multisectoral committee to draft an action plan. The global network provides policy proposals developed through comparative research and financial resources. The primary contribution of the network, however, is the city consultation process itself, through which those global recommendations can be adapted to reflect local priorities, resources, and creative ideas. In the case of the Travel and Tourism Industry network, annual progress notes based on regional meetings with local-level actors are produced. These progress notes are meant to be merged with Agenda 21 for the travel and tourism industry -- the drafting of which was dominated by industrialized-country efforts -- to represent the latest thinking on sustainable development.
The notion of developing flexible approaches at the global level that can then be adapted and shaped to fit local realities is more difficult to realize in global standards-setting (discussed below). There a level playing field may be key for the success of a network. Nonetheless, some of the cases discussed in this report illustrate that as long as the desired outcomes are achieved, networks may permit different processes for achieving them.
Capacity-building
A primary obstacle to effective local and developing-country participation in global networks has been their limited financial and organizational capacity. Local and developing-country groups also have less access to basic information than do their transnational counterparts in the industrial countries. This situation is particularly evident with respect to information technology, where the world is becoming increasingly divided between those who have access and those who do not. This division does not line up cleanly along either the local-global or the North-South dimension. Many governments and NGOs in developing countries have access to e-mail and the Internet, whereas many groups in the industrialized world, especially in rural areas and inner cities, do not. On average, though, the South is less "connected" than the North. Regardless, it is clear that grass-roots organizations around the world are limited in the extent to which they can link up with global networks.
Several networks have tried to address this need for capacity-building among local and developing-country partners. RBM, for example, offers direct help and expertise to countries that lack the capacity to develop implementation plans. This network also works through its multilateral members to restructure health-care sectors in affected countries. In the initial phases of the ISO 14000 negotiations, developing-country participation was limited by a lack of technical expertise, financial constraints, and poor access to information. Industrialized states tried to enable developing-country actors (states as well as NGOs) to participate by providing them with financial support, but as discussed in Chapter 3, these efforts fell short.
CGIAR has tried to build the capacity of its collaborators among the national agricultural research centres of developing countries through training and technical advice. One of the 16 centres it supports, the International Service for National Agricultural Research, has the strengthening of national research systems as its principal goal. Nevertheless, given the size of the task and CGIAR's limited resources, the organization has never reached a full consensus on how high a priority to give to this function. Based on this limited range of experiences, it would seem that there is room for more creative strategies to build the capacity of local and developing-country groups to participate in networking.
In general, capacity-building is a long-term process. As many donor agencies and NGOs increasingly recognize, capacity-building activities are most effective when they are demand-driven, that is, determined by the articulated needs of civil-society and state actors themselves, not imposed on them. The case of the RBM network, discussed in Chapter 3, nicely illustrates this approach.
This chapter -- based on a review of our cases -- has addressed several key managerial challenges that networks face. It is important for international organizations in general and the United Nations in particular to address these challenges.
Chapter 5. Networks and the United Nations
Document(s) 8 of 14

The world this report has described demands innovative responses to the challenges of global governance, and it has particular implications for the work of the United Nations. The leadership of the United Nations has begun to place the idea of GPP networks at the forefront of its vision and strategy for the UN system so that the organization can more effectively address the challenges facing the world in the 21st century. In his 1999 address to the Annual Meetings of the World Economic Forum, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed the following:
The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community, and civil society.
Similarly, Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the UNDP, noted in his foreword to the 1999 Human Development Report that
We are seeing the emergence of a new, much less formal structure of global governance, where governments and partners in civil society, the private sector and others are forming functional coalitions across geographic borders and traditional political lines to move public policy in ways that meet the aspirations of a global citizenry. ... These coalitions use the convening power and the consensus-building, standard-setting and implementing roles of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and international organizations, but their key strength is that they are bigger than any of us and give new expression to the UN Charter's "We, the peoples."
These statements indicate a clear recognition that for the United Nations to succeed in its mission in the new millennium, it needs to develop a systematic and reliable approach to working together with governments, business, and civil society in GPP networks. Equally important, by facilitating the emergence of these networks and contributing to their effective operation, as well as by strengthening the capacities of states and nonstate actors to participate in GPPs, the United Nations will increase its own effectiveness and credibility. In so doing it will demonstrate to a range of stakeholders and observers, most importantly its clients (member countries), that it is able to support and facilitate the degree of interaction and social learning necessary for GPP networks to succeed.
The Secretary General's Millennium Report -- We, the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, in support of which this publication was written -- points out the importance of global public policy networks in redefining the role of the UN:
Formal institutional arrangements may often lack the scope, speed and informational capacity to keep up with the rapidly changing global agenda. Mobilizing 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. The United Nations is well situated to nurture such informal "coalitions for change" across our various areas of responsibility.
The UN's core missions of global peace, sustainable development, and humanitarian relief provide a mandate for the organization to get involved in some of the key global challenges of the 21st century. In addition, given its universal membership, the United Nations is well placed to highlight and address the often neglected but critical challenges of inclusion identified in Chapter 4. Finally, by acting as a facilitator of, and platform for, GPP networks, the United Nations can play an intermediary role between states and business, as well as civil society. Although states' rationale and legitimacy for the foreseeable future will remain constrained by territorial sovereignty, business, which takes advantage of open markets and the technological revolution, has long escaped those constraints.
At the same time, the developments outlined in Chapter 2 have posed a direct challenge to the UN's mission and its ability to respond to today's increasingly complex public-policy issues. Moreover, there are more member states of the United Nations today than ever before, and the economic and informational inequalities between states have increased dramatically, placing the institution's commitment to universalism under strain. Working in and with GPP networks will increasingly be, not just a policy choice, but indeed an operational imperative for the United Nations and its specialized agencies, if it is to meet its own goals effectively and efficiently. In many ways, the future of GPP networks is the future of the United Nations, and vice versa.
This report proposes a three-track approach toward engaging the United Nations in GPP networks. In order for the organization to decide which roles to assume in these networks and how it can coordinate its actions with those of other players, it needs to develop mechanisms of prioritization, coordination, and engagement with private firms and civil society.
FROM VISION TO REALITY: A THREE-TRACK APPROACH
The United Nations does not have to reinvent the wheel to become more engaged in GPP networks. As several of the cases discussed in previous chapters have shown, the United Nations and its specialized agencies are already active in a number of such networks, ranging from technical standards and regulations (International Telecommunication Union, International Civil Aviation Organization, Universal Postal Union, and International Maritime Organization), to sustainable development and human rights (UNEP, WHO, FAO, ILO, UNDP, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [UNHCHR], and others), to humanitarian relief, refugees, security, disarmament, and political reconstruction (Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees). In some cases, network structures are present in the first two issue areas and less visible, but increasingly important, in the third.
Yet the organization's involvement to date has been piecemeal if not accidental, rather than the result of a deliberate, overarching strategic choice that recognizes the systemic transformation of the international system and considers networks a promising response. Most of these initiatives remain ad hoc and largely at the specialized agency level. UN participation in networks is often uncoordinated across agencies, and there is an absence of a strategic vision that emphasizes selectivity with respect to policy domains and potential roles for the UN system, to ensure maximum leverage and close alignment with its mission. Furthermore, the lessons from these varied experiences among different UN agencies have not been synthesized and analyzed so that others both within the organization and without can learn and best practices can be shared. Lastly, the United Nations has yet to call for a global dialogue with its partner institutions to determine a division of labour that ensures that each institution's comparative advantage is brought to bear in addressing global challenges, ensuring synergies and thus effectiveness and efficiency.
A strategic vision for future engagement of the United Nations in GPP networks has to take into account both the lessons already learned (as presented in the previous chapters) and political realities. The experience of recent reform initiatives and contemporary political realities indicate that there will be no major institutional reforms on the horizon for the United Nations, nor can it expect any major new financial resources. The United Nations faces significant constraints in its political, human, and financial resources and must marshal those limited resources in a strategic manner to leverage change. Building on the lessons learned from our cases and on these political realities, the three-track approach we propose for enhancing UN engagement with GPP networks is at once feasible and visionary:
· Strengthen and consolidate existing networks by focusing on implementation and learning processes;
· Build implementation networks that will help to revitalize weak or weakening conventions that are important to the UN mission; and
· Launch new networks where they are needed.
The emphasis on strengthening existing GPP networks concerns those networks whose norms and objectives are clear and have broad support and where the United Nations has comparative advantage in improving inclusiveness and implementation and (or) learning within the network. Strengthening these networks requires a clear and feasible framework for implementation, mechanisms of capacity-building that support inclusiveness and implementation, and the ability of the network to learn from the implementation process. Strengthening GPP networks' abilities to deliver on implementation and learning typically focuses attention on the local-global interaction and shifts the focus away from interaction among and between transnational businesses, international NGOs, and national governments, which tend to dominate the negotiation phase. Networks that have integrated local actors earlier in the policy cycle tend to have fewer problems in implementation, because capacity issues are addressed up front and there is more systematic attention to the local-global dynamic. In the absence of additional financial resources, and given the often delicate political issues involved, the primary emphasis should be on maximizing knowledge resources and creating the most basic information and communications infrastructures, which remain elusive for many.
Chapter 3 touched on the problems of a growing overlap and competition between various initiatives on, for example, codes of conduct, nonbinding auditing procedures, and labels. Competition among these schemes will no doubt allow policymakers to discover their respective strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, however, as previous chapters have shown, the presence of multiple schemes addressing a given issue risks undermining the effort of all of them. UN agencies could help to consolidate existing initiatives and develop, in collaboration with other actors, a set of "metastandards" that would embrace best practices in reporting and auditing procedures, such as social audits or efforts to monitor compliance, and combine them with voluntary initiatives such as codes of conduct. Although such overarching standards run the risk of eliminating the potential for learning that competition entails, the internal learning mechanisms that transparent and inclusive networks contain can compensate for that.
As the GEF has demonstrated, GPP networks can help in the implementation of conventions that are central to the UN's mission. The United Nations could help build trisectoral implementation networks to revitalize weak or weakening conventions at the core of its mission, such as the Kyoto Protocol. This would include strengthening pro-reform allies in the business sector (for example, in the insurance and alternative-energy industries), continuing to support scientific and policy research to strengthen the existing transnational research communities (with a selective focus on key countries), and strengthening pro-reform advocacy coalitions between the state and civil society to reduce the divide between North and South.
One dimension of leveraging resources requires the United Nations to act as a network entrepreneur, identifying niches where conditions for launching new GPP neworks are ripe, but no one is willing or able to initiate the process, or the process seems to be stalled. Issue areas where such conditions may now exist include genetically modified organisms, fisheries, and transnational crime, including money-laundering. For example, the Secretary General's Millennium Report acknowledges that the issue of biotechnology and genetically modified organisms now demands a broad dialogue amongst a range of stakeholders. That is why the Secretary General calls for a global public policy network to address the risks and opportunities associated with the increased use of biotechnology and bioengineering. Initially such an effort would identify certain specific areas such as food security, where incentive structures have changed in such a way that the prospects for social learning have grown and there are reasons to believe that participants may share a genuine interest in the evolution of consensual knowledge. The experience of the WCD provides a useful starting point for developing a plan of action. If the United Nations were to act in such an entrepreneurial fashion in issue areas critical to its core mission, such initiatives could expand the organization's political legitimacy in powerful states and could be the basis for leveraging new resources.
From a broader perspective, the United Nations needs to carefully evaluate how many of those tracks it wants to pursue at the same time. The current structure, skill mix, and resources of the organization may pose real limits. This will also be influenced by the functions the network is supposed to perform. Developing and disseminating knowledge are likely to require less time and fewer resources than negotiating and setting standards. Nevertheless, making a commitment to any network, new or old, without following through would send the wrong signal to clients and partners.
ROLES FOR THE UNITED NATIONS IN GPP NETWORKS
To make this ambitious but by no means unrealistic three-track approach work, the United Nations and its specialized agencies can play a number of roles in these networks: convenor, provider of a platform and "safe space," social entrepreneur, norm entrepreneur, multilevel-network manager, and capacity-builder. Prioritizing is therefore not just a matter of making a commitment to an existing network or supporting a new one. It also requires a clear understanding of the specific role or roles the United Nations is prepared to perform in the network and the results that its involvement is expected to deliver. This needs to be communicated to the other network participants, so that partnerships do not falter because of false expectations. Indeed, transparent and reliable partnerships will be a critical success factor in executing all of the above functions. The United Nations should take greater advantage of the growing interest of other organizations in supporting GPP networks. On the private-sector side, the International Chamber of Commerce already cooperates with a number of UN agencies in the GPP agenda. Similarly, the World Economic Forum has demonstrated a growing interest in this topic. Its members, convening power, and the recently launched Center for the Global Agenda make it a valuable partner in network facilitation and management.
The United Nations as convenor
Some of the UN's most critical roles have been played behind the scenes, bringing key stakeholders together and creating the necessary conditions for consensual knowledge-building. It does this by brokering deals and mobilizing key constituencies for the effective operation of networks. Perhaps the organization's most consistent and unique contribution to the emergence and operation of GPP networks has been -- and should be -- in convening networks. UN agencies have demonstrated comparative advantage in organizing and convening meetings on issues where conflicts arise across the North-South divide. They have also shown comparative advantage in contributing to processes of consensual knowledge-building in a wide range of scientific and technical fields: examples include UNEP, WHO, and the technical agencies. UN agencies are often accepted more readily as intermediaries in developing countries than the Bretton Woods institutions because the UN agencies are not seen as being dominated by the industrial countries.
United Nations agencies as providers of a platform and a safe space
UN agencies have provided a platform and a safe space for people and institutions coming together in a network. The agencies do this by providing a level playing field for negotiations and for consensual knowledge-building. UN agencies can thus be catalysts for networks, as was the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) with its Partners for Development summit meeting. That meeting served as a locus for information and knowledge exchange for partnership-building between UNCTAD and other state and nonstate actors. Unlike most intergovernmental meetings, Partners for Development was not concerned with the negotiation of an agreed text. Instead, UNCTAD acted as a matchmaker, bringing together interested outside parties around established aspects of the organization's work. Another good example of catalytic engagement is the collaboration between the World Bank and the IUCN in the establishment of the WCD.
By acting as a platform, the United Nations can and should facilitate partnerships between NGOs and the business community. Collaborative links between these two constituencies are tentative and only just beginning, often against a backdrop of a long history of confrontation and conflict. The United Nations can help these two sectors identify the benefits of working together in trisectoral networks.
United Nations staff as social entrepreneurs
As discussed in Chapter 4, one of the clear lessons learned from the early stage of effective trisectoral networks is the importance of skilled entrepreneurial leadership. UN officials who have provided such leadership include James Grant of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and Mustafa Tolba of UNEP, during negotiations of the CBD, the UNFCCC, and Agenda 21. Currently, Gro Harlem Brundtland at WHO, Carol Bellamy of UNICEF, and Klaus Töpfer of UNEP, among others, play such roles. But important as such high-profile leadership is in the initiation phase of a network, both UN agencies and staff should also focus their social entrepreneurship on such aspects as inclusion, effectiveness, and results once the network is operational. Thus, UN agencies and staff may play various roles at the same time in a network, or the same agency may play various roles in various phases of the policy cycle.
United Nations agencies as norm entrepreneurs
UN agencies can also act as norm entrepreneurs or advocates by using networks as platforms to advance norms in such areas as sustainable human development, human rights, and disarmament. UNICEF in the 1980s, joined since 1990 by the UNDP, with its annual Human Development Report, has reshaped the analytical framework and the discourse on development issues. UNICEF has also done so with respect to landmines, child soldiers, and other children's-rights issues. UNHCHR is primarily a norm entrepreneur, and it has exercised such leadership through its de facto advocacy coalition with like-minded states and NGOs for the creation of the International Criminal Court. Recent secretaries-general have been important advocates for a range of disarmament issues, including landmine removal and the CWC.
United Nations agencies as multilevel-network managers
The most challenging role of the United Nations with respect to networks, and an increasingly important one, is that of a multilevel-network manager. In the case of the RBM initiative, for example, WHO is involved in coordinating program activities, and the World Bank and WHO are involved in working with transnational and domestic health-sector-reform constituencies in developing countries to consolidate change coalitions. The organizations support these reform efforts by providing technical assistance and financial resources. For the learning dimension to work well, engagement at multiple levels is vital.
With the dual trends of greater devolution of authority through decentralization and the strengthening of supranational forms of governance, the challenge for the United Nations is to develop strategies for interacting with the appropriate levels of governance on particular issues at appropriate stages of the public-policy cycle. Once the local-global dimension of inclusion is being taken seriously and the network moves to implementation, the function of a multilevel-network manager will become very important, in conjunction with the function of capacity-building.
United Nations agencies as capacity-builders
As Chapter 4 has shown, capacity-building to enable more widespread participation in networks (input capacity) is key to ensuring inclusiveness, from both local-global and North-South perspectives. But capacity-building has a second dimension with respect to implementation, as discussed in Chapter 3. From that perspective, capacity-building is also critical to ensuring actual implementation and thus results (output capacity). The United Nations has a role to play in leveraging resources, both to enable people and organizations to participate in a network and to strengthen their ability to live up to their commitments.
As the examples in Chapter 4 have illustrated, capacity-building on the input side involves identifying and addressing gaps in financial, organizational, human, and knowledge resources that prevent organizations from working effectively in GPP networks. An important step in that direction is the UNDP's Sustainable Development Networking program. This partnership of governments, businesses, and NGOs is designed to help developing countries acquire the capacity to contribute solutions for sustainable development and to access solutions contributed by others, through the new ICTs. But more needs to be done.
In many cases, state and nonstate actors in developed and developing countries alike need to develop capacities to help monitor the policies that GPP networks have implemented -- the GEF is an example where this has been done. Although industrial-country groups often also need to build capacity, the UN's focus should be on developing-country groups, simply for the sake of equity. Given that additional financial resources are unlikely to be forthcoming, one way to do this would be to strengthen current ties with networks that invest in sharing information, experiences, and resources, such as the Global Knowledge Partnership recently launched by the World Bank (Box 16).

Box 16 The Global Knowledge Partnership · The Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) is an evolving informal partnership of more than 50 public institutions, businesses, and NGOs from industrial and developing countries; · It is committed to the idea that sharing information about experiences and resources is an effective way of ensuring equitable development; · Members of the GKP feel that the information revolution can be a positive force in providing individuals and communities with the resources they need to ensure sustainable development; · It takes shape from the idea that increased partnership and learning among the public, the business community, and not-for-profit organizations will ensure the inclusion of the poorest states and people of the world; · It has adopted a range of regional platforms that seek to improve access to knowledge and guarantee inclusion of all partners; · It organizes regional workshops and seminars to increase the exchange of knowledge in various communities and train citizens in the use of new technology; · It designs its various activities so as to produce such concrete results as improvements in agricultural practices, better employment opportunities, and improved access to telephones, computers, and other knowledge tools; · It admits as members those organizations that agree to support at least one initiative being conducted by the partnership; and · It is coordinated by the World Bank Institute with a small and informal secretariat. Find out more about the GKP at www.globalknowledge.org on the Internet.
The United Nations has already demonstrated comparative advantage, relative to other international organizations in state capacity-building, through the UNDP's governance program and the UMP. State capacity remains critical for effective participation in, and implementation of, GPP networks. Indeed, implementation of many GPPs relies upon state capacity at the national and local levels. The participation of civil society and business is not a substitute for capable and effective state institutions but a complement to them. The combination of scarce resources and political constraints means that for the foreseeable future, the United Nations will and should emphasize the building of state capacity at the national and local levels while supporting other efforts to provide resources for building capacity in civil society. To the extent that activities directed to state capacity-building are undertaken with a network framework in place, such activities will generate their own demand for building the capacity of states to engage in trisectoral networks and the capacity of their partners (civil society and business) to participate in such networks.
The United Nations as financier
Although it is an increasingly difficult role for the organization to play, the United Nations sometimes acts as a financier, providing resources for a range of operational programs related to the implementation of GPPs. Examples include immunization and reproductive health projects, projects to eliminate land mines, microfinance projects, and disease eradication and control projects. In some cases the United Nations serves as an intermediary, distributing earmarked funds supplied by others (for example, in the area of reproductive health); in others it contributes its own resources (as in microfinance); and in many others it does both (in landmine action and immunization).
It is crucial for the United Nations to facilitate the participation of disempowered or marginalized constituencies in ongoing networks or in networks that they help initiate. Thereby the United Nations can play the overall role of ensuring the inclusion of constituencies that are affected by the issue tackled by a particular network but are often left out of these policy processes, such as women or the poor and disenfranchised.
When taking over any of these roles, the United Nations has to know when to cut its losses and move to other venues with more promising opportunities. Political stalemates, after all, do not only occur outside the UN system. To minimize the waste of scarce resources, UN staff and member-country delegations need to identify when the "UN process" -- the laborious process of consensus-building among large groups of states -- only contributes to stalemate. Often this results from the ability of a small number of powerful states to effectively derail consensus. In such situations, staff should support efforts to move initiatives outside the system and redirect its support.
The landmines case illustrates perhaps most clearly how the UN process can become an obstacle to progress. The Ottawa process was begun by an alliance between some like-minded states and NGOs, reacting to a stalemate within the UN system. Some specialized agencies of the United Nations became active supporters. The forests case is one where increasing complexity -- in the form of linkages between forest issues and other environmental, economic, and social issues -- combined with intergovernmental stalemate virtually stifled progress. As the case study shows, there is little or no consensual knowledge that unites stakeholders in this issue area. In cases where the intergovernmental process has failed, such as in negotiations on the forest convention, NGOs have initiated their own networks. An example is the Forest Stewardship Council, where NGOs have joined with some actors from the business sector (governments were and are still excluded), with the overall aim of making progress on certification issues. The United Nations should focus its efforts on supporting and learning from such efforts.
In sum, despite the excitement that always comes from creating an open process and from pulling diverse sectors and resources together, the United Nations must approach networking soberly. It must consider in every instance whether there is sufficient interest and whether it has sufficient capacity and comparative advantage to play a productive and worthwhile role in the network. This presupposes a number of management changes within the UN system.
MAKING THE UNITED NATIONS FIT FOR GPP NETWORKS
Mechanisms for issue prioritization and coordination
With a large number of initiatives launched just during the last few years, GPP networks are developing into a growth industry, increasing the need for a strategic approach. To become more selective in its network involvement and to better coordinate global network initiatives, the United Nations needs first to develop mechanisms for prioritizing and coordinating those nascent issues that call for UN involvement. It also needs to ensure that its own activities neither duplicate the work of other multilateral organizations nor work at cross-purposes to them.
Taking stock
As a first step, the UN system should take stock of ongoing GPP initiatives in which it is involved. Such an overview would not only help to get a comprehensive perspective on the organization's activities but also likely detect potential room for synergies and better coordination among UN agencies. In addition, a UN-wide survey could take advantage of the vast pool of knowledge that already exists among the staff about network management and implementation. The survey should identify current institutional hurdles and bottlenecks and ask what concrete steps management can take to facilitate the UN's role as a network entrepreneur. Finally, strategic choice cannot be informed only by how important an initiative is; it must also consider how good an organization is at executing such an initiative. Therefore, an overview of this kind should also arrive at a preliminary cost-benefit analysis of individual initiatives and the UN's ultimate impact and how it can be improved. This requires external input from clients and partners addressing the UN's legitimacy, positioning, and strategic thrust, as well as the operational impact and measurable results of GPP networks on the ground.
Addressing selectivity and interagency coordination
UN participation in GPP networks has been at its most effective when several agencies have participated, each bringing its own comparative advantages to the process. For example, in the Polio Eradication Network, WHO provides the global technical leadership and overall coordination; UNICEF acts as the major provider of vaccines and immunization equipment and as the program's global advocate, also playing a key role in social mobilization and providing operational support in the field. In the RBM initiative, WHO provides technical assistance and coordination, and the World Bank provides policy advice on health-sector reform. Comparative advantages are most readily identified when stakeholders and policy objectives are explicit and the objectives are shared, rather than being obscured or contested. Interagency coordination is needed at the headquarters level as well, as in on-the-ground implementation. The Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC) and the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) are two venues within the UN system that could complement each other's activities to fulfill the many tasks that successful network management, including implementation, requires. The "issue-management system" would provide an ideal vehicle through which GPP networks could be established.
In principle, the ACC could offer a venue wherein priorities could be identified, and thereafter it could coordinate interagency collaboration with respect to the overall strategy. Obviously, the actual identification of priorities has to involve far-reaching external consultations conducted by agencies individually. But as far as prioritization within the United Nations is concerned, the ACC could ensure that the agencies' own strategic priorities are sufficiently taken into account. To ensure that networks do not work at cross-purposes with existing priorities, coordination, too, could rely on the ACC. Specifically, the Secretary-General's reform agenda (as laid out in his report "Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform") recognizes that
Traditional processes of coordination need to be supplemented by a series of practical arrangements which provide for more active, cooperative management ... both within the United Nations system and extending to other involved intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations.
Arrangements of this kind are not entirely new. Examples include the working groups and task forces that have emerged over the past decade as mechanisms for preparing for, and following up on, the series of global conferences held in the 1990s.
This need for more informal processes coincides with a slight shift in the ACC's agenda. As a result of ongoing strategic discussions and coordination activities, the ACC has become engaged in substantive discussions on issues facing the world community. These issues cannot be addressed by a single UN agency with a mandate to lead, and they have pushed the ACC beyond its narrow role of administrative coordination toward acting as a deliberative body that releases the outcomes of discussions aimed at having an impact on governments, civil society, and business. To further facilitate selectivity and coordination at the global level, as well as create more space for the ACC's emerging policy role, the Secretary-General's reform program provided for the establishment of an issue-management system, which could serve as the foundation for GPP networks. The concept of an issue-management system, which is now in the early stage of implementation through the Secretariat of the ACC, is not without precedent. It had its origins in the initiative undertaken by the Secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in developing Agenda 21. Issue-specific working parties or task forces would be composed of a representative from each of the principal organizations with an interest or capacity in the area concerned and would be headed by a lead organization that would also provide secretariat support. The working party or task force could be established either for an indefinite period (for issues demanding ongoing cooperation) or on an ad hoc, time-limited basis (to respond to short-term needs for cooperation).
The growing deliberative policy role of the ACC has the potential to overcome the current fragmentation in addressing the growing complexity of many global challenges. Moreover, a more flexible organizational approach could enhance UN participation in GPP networks in three ways. First, it would enable the United Nations to respond more rapidly to GPP issues. Second, it could help the organization deploy its limited human resources in a more targeted and effective manner. Third, it would address the recurring complaints from states, NGOs, the business sector, and other international organizations that UN interagency coordination is weak.
Take sustainable development for example. The principal UN organization dealing with the environment is UNEP, whose policy directions are given by its governing council. The recently formed Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which services the Commission on Sustainable Development, has a major responsibility for sustainable development and the follow-up to the Rio Conference. At the intersecretariat level, the main mechanism for coordination is provided by the Inter-Agency Committee on Sustainable Development (IACSD) of the ACC, which, despite early problems, is functioning fairly well through its system of task managers and assigns "lead" coordinating roles to its members, depending upon the sectoral issues being dealt with in the context of Agenda 21. In addition, UNEP also has an Environment Coordination Group. Both the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Second Committee of the General Assembly also continue to play an important policy and coordination role in the environmental and sustainable development areas.
To bring more clarity to the current proliferation of forums where environment and sustainable development issues are discussed or coordinated, at both the intergovernmental and the interagency levels, the IACSD could develop general policy directions in the area of sustainable development, and the ACC Task Force could set basic guidelines for interagency cooperation; the role of UNEP would be to develop environmental policies and facilitate arrangements with UN institutions for their coordinated implementation. This is, in fact, the general direction toward which the UN system has been moving since 1992. This division of labour would enable network partners to engage in discussions or activities at the appropriate levels; at the same time, it would maximize the UN's impact in global policy networks organized around sustainable development issues.
As discussed above, developing both input and output capacities is critical for the success of any network. Thus, not only the UN's mission but also its role in network facilitation suggests strong support for network capacity-building. The coordination of activities at the national and local levels has traditionally been a weak spot of operational and field-related activities. As an umbrella organization, the UNDG is, in principle, well positioned to serve as a coordinator for network capacity-building, by facilitating a process that enables network partners in the United Nations to prioritize capacity-building according to need and comparative advantage.
This role aligns squarely with the UNDG's central goal of strengthening the policy and program coherence and the effectiveness of UN development activities. The coordination of capacity-building efforts would be an integral step in establishing a UN Development Assistance Framework. It could build on the efforts to harmonize the program cycles for individual countries and develop into a cross-country effort to enhance the UN's efforts in capacity-building operations. By acting as a backstop for GPP networks, especially as far as capacity-building and implementation are concerned, the UNDG could provide a suitable complement to the network-related activities of the ACC, establishing an integrated framework for network prioritization and coordination in the UN system.
Coordinating a multilateral division of labour
A comprehensive strategy for network prioritization and coordination must reach far beyond the UN system. The United Nations should engage its counterparts -- the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the IMF, the regional development institutions, and, where appropriate, collective security institutions -- in a dialogue on selectivity and prioritization. The aim of this dialogue should be to achieve a division of labour that identifies lead institutions, to be supported by others with relevant expertise. Some central but "light" coordination may be helpful (see below), but actual operations should be coordinated through informal task forces that represent the interested institutions and are empowered to operate with the fewest possible layers of bureaucracy in the various multilateral institutions. Given the changing nature of the international system, international organizations will face a growing demand for global risk management and crisis response from member governments and other constituents. Anything but a highly agile and informal global response team with full support from its parent institutions is unlikely to be able to meet that demand.
Supporting the United Nations system
The United Nations should support the establishment of a clearinghouse for GPP networks. This clearinghouse, provided with a small secretariat, could act as a hub for network-related activities both within the United Nations and beyond. As a centre for knowledge management, the clearinghouse would
· Ensure that interested parties are informed about ongoing network activities both inside and outside the United Nations;
· Identify potential areas for new network activity; and
· Disseminate knowledge and lessons about best practices.
Creating a website and publishing a newsletter would make the centre accessible to a broad audience, including those who play a principal role in providing relevant information.
Such a clearinghouse could also build internal capacity by supporting programs to provide UN staff with training periods in civil society, business, and governments. Sabbaticals and secondments would allow these staff members to work in the private or the nonprofit sector to gain first-hand knowledge of how that sector works. Whether such a clearinghouse is best located within the UN system or outside it is an issue that deserves careful consideration.
Reaching out to external partners
For the United Nations to become an active player in GPP networks, it needs to reach out to its external partners. Coalition-building involves identifying unmobilized constituencies and strengthening existing ones to move forward on the implementation of existing networks. To evolve into a credible intermediary between sectors, the United Nations has to strengthen its efforts to enter into a fruitful and cooperative dialogue with NGOs and the business community.
In recent years, the United Nations has missed opportunities for strengthening relations with NGOs. In 1995, the Commission on Global Governance put on the record that "UN-NGO relationships are improving." As Ed Luck pointed out in a recent report to the Commission, the same cannot be said a mere 5 years later. The United Nations has failed to take advantage of the dramatic increase in civil society's interest in participation, which was the legacy of the significant expansion of NGO participation in the series of world conferences. These gains are now threatened by a reduction in NGOs' access to the meetings set up to evaluate progress toward the commitments made at those conferences. They are also threatened by the glacial pace with which new mechanisms are being created for NGOs to interact with the new organizational processes that resulted from those conferences, such as the IACSD. These weak or worsening relations do not bode well for the UN's bid to pursue any of the three tracks proposed above.
The institution's interaction with nonprofit foundations could also be strengthened. UN agencies are involved in some networks that include nonprofit foundations: WHO is involved in networks dedicated to disease eradication; FAO and UNDP worked closely with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations in creating CGIAR. Although the foundations have become a less important factor in CGIAR, the working relationship continues to this day. But in general, the United Nations has not developed strong relationships with foundations. Such relationships will be particularly important if the organization hopes to leverage funds in a period of scarce financial resources. The United Nations Foundation might be tasked to serve as a coordinator between the United Nations and other foundations. The Secretary-General's report on the UN system's interactions with NGOs identifies areas where insufficient financial resources hinder greater cooperation between them, as well as some areas where member countries could assist the United Nations in facilitating such cooperation. Follow-up by the Secretariat or another entity, such as the proposed clearinghouse, to encourage member-country delegations to facilitate such cooperation is required.
NGOs have offered a range of proposals to strengthen the various formal mechanisms for enhancing their participation in UN activities, to strengthen UN-NGO partnerships, to increase resources for the Non-Governmental Liaison Service (NGLS), and to revive the trust fund for developing-country NGOs to provide funding for travel and other costs associated with participation at UN events and meetings. As many of our case studies have shown, this is a critical issue if inclusion of local and developing-country actors is to work. This report endorses these proposals, as they should promote the UN's credibility and legitimacy as a facilitator of networks. The United Nations should also work with the developing-country-led International Forum on Capacity Building to create a privately administered, voluntary fund to support capacity-building activities for NGOs in developing countries.
The United Nations has yet to develop a system-wide, formal mechanism for interacting with the business community, apart from business associations accredited as NGOs. Corporations are powerful and important stakeholders whose participation is critical to the success of many networks. NGOs have various formal mechanisms for interaction with the United Nations, including consultative status with ECOSOC, accreditation with the Department of Public Information, and the NGLS. The UN technical agencies have regular contact with businesses, and some of the development and humanitarian agencies have operational interactions with them, but there is no system-wide strategic framework along those lines. The private sector should be offered similar access. One possible institutional mechanism for private-sector-United Nations interaction would be an interagency liaison service for the private sector.
The Global Compact -- an initiative launched by the UN Secretary-General in his 1999 speech at the World Economic Forum -- can be seen as a first and important step toward a more systematic relationship between the United Nations and the for-profit private sector. The Compact correctly assumes that the challenge of closing the governance gaps has to be met at the microlevel, by involving individual companies. It also realizes the importance of addressing collective-action problems on the business side, by promoting cooperation with business associations.
However, for the United Nations to play a greater role in global norm- and standards-setting, a trisectoral approach is key. As we have seen in several of the cases reviewed for this report, such as the WCD and the MAI, the legitimacy and effectiveness of global norm- and standards-setting initiatives depend on the participation of all stakeholders. Participants need to be selected with great care, respecting such principles as balance of power and inclusiveness. Thus, in addition to each individual effort, the United Nations faces the challenge of linking its initiatives with NGOs and businesses. This is certainly a demanding task, but if it engages with NGOs and the business sector separately, rather than acting as a convenor for all sectors, the United Nations risks undermining both its credibility and its effectiveness. This is echoed in the concerns and criticisms raised in conjunction with the organization's recent initiatives toward closer cooperation with the business sector. Some NGOs and even some member governments claim that these initiatives allow companies to exploit the United Nations for a cheap public-relations advantage and even enable corporations to set the policy agendas of the UN agencies involved, to which they provide much-needed financial resources.
A trisectoral approach would address these concerns by facilitating collaboration between civil society and the business sector. One stepping-stone to improving relations and entering into a constructive strategic dialogue with key actors from the business and NGO communities would be to develop the Global Compact on a trisectoral basis. By making itself a safe place for all the key actors to convene to negotiate politically controversial issues, the United Nations could fill a major gap in governance.
The ultimate currency of GPP networks is their ability to effectively marry knowledge with power. In today's world, the United Nations needs to pay attention to its ability to offer itself as a safe place, not only for its traditional stakeholders -- member governments -- but also for the business community and civil society. Trisectoral networks provide a mechanism for the United Nations to rebuild its credibility and, indeed, the only way to achieve its increasingly complex missions with scarce resources in the 21st century. The organization's ability to effectively initiate, maintain, and participate in such networks will largely determine the extent to which it can achieve its mission -- not least in the eyes of its constituents.
By successfully engaging in GPP networks, the United Nations performs a vital service to its member states. It is they that are ultimately strengthened by these networks' activities. Networks help member states take advantage of the benefits and address the challenges of technological change and economic and social integration and thus perform their duties to their citizens in a more effective and legitimate way.

Chapter 6. Conclusion
Document(s) 9 of 14

The United Nations is at a critical juncture. In an increasingly interconnected world, new forms of global governance have emerged. GPP networks embrace the very forces of globalization that have confounded and complicated traditional governance structures, challenging the operational capacity and democratic responsiveness of governments. They are distinctive in their ability to bring people and institutions from diverse backgrounds together, often when they have been working against one another for years. Making use of the strength of weak ties, networks can handle this diversity of actors precisely because of the productive tensions on which they rest. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated, "This partnership of NGOs, the private sector, international organizations and governments ... is a powerful partnership for the future." GPP networks thus represent a promising medium through which the United Nations can achieve its mission, maintain its relevance in a changing global environment, and serve its members in a more effective and efficient way.
But they also represent a unique opportunity for governments to regain the initiative in the debate over the future of global governance. It is crucial for member states of the United Nations to understand that GPP networks are meant not to replace governments but to complement them. Empowering those entities that constitute the real basis of legitimate and accountable global governance amounts to neither a zero-sum game nor a power shift. Rather, it provides an opportunity to strengthen those institutions that are charged with the execution of policy. Networks enable governments to better manage the risks and take advantage of the opportunities that economic liberalization and technological change bring, making governments more responsive to their constituents.
This report has barely skimmed the surface in its survey of the processes and dynamics of trisectoral networks. A comparative examination of recent experiences suggests that networks perform a number of functions. By bringing together actors from different sectors to address specific transnational issues, networks place those issues on the global governance agenda and pressure existing structures to take action. Networks also convene multiple stakeholders in setting regulations and designing standards, and they are deeply involved in the development and dissemination of knowledge. Some networks seek to create markets where they do not yet exist and to deepen them where they are falling short of their potential. Several global networks have been formed to assist in the implementation of intergovernmental treaties. And by involving actors from multiple sectors and levels in the policy-making process, all networks work toward closing the participatory gap in global governance.
However, for GPP networks to become a reliable and more widely used instrument in the arsenal of global governance, the United Nations has to become an active player. It has to help address the managerial challenges and current weaknesses in these networks, most of all the dual challenge of inclusion. Whether networks become legitimate governance structures and can implement policies on the ground will ultimately depend upon greater inclusion of participants from developing countries and from local institutions at all stages of the policy cycle.
Two roles for the United Nations in particular stand out. The first is derived from the need for greater inclusiveness in global decision-making. The United Nations should be charged with creating an enabling environment that permits countries, especially in the developing world, to participate in the establishment of trisectoral networks and enables them to implement and enforce the decisions made in these networks in their own domestic institutional and policy context. This includes a focus on capacity-building, widespread dissemination of information, and establishment of a knowledge base that empowers all parties involved to contribute to the debate over the public-policy issue at hand.
The second role stems from the fact that international organizations in general and the United Nations in particular are in a good position to provide a platform for convening trisectoral networks. Taking on the roles of enabler of existing networks and convenor of new ones presupposes a greater humility, some internal capacity-building on the part of international organizations to ensure a greater emphasis on selectivity, and coordination among them to minimize competition. In reality, however, international organizations often still prefer a bureaucratic, top-down approach that threatens to suffocate the dynamism of emerging networks. For this reason it might be best for now to position networks outside those organizations, to avoid burdening them with the existing organizations' still unresolved internal problems.
To become reliable team players in GPP networks, the United Nations and its specialized agencies have to implement a number of organizational changes, including mechanisms for prioritizing and coordinating nascent issues. Although GPP networks offer an innovative and dynamic approach to governance, they will not work without adjustments to all their component parts. Collaboration in networks for global public-policy-making requires adjustment on the part of both network participants and the existing institutions in charge of public policy, that is, states and international organizations. This raises a number of critical issues with regard to institutional management, learning, and change, which were discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 and, specifically with regard to the United Nations, in Chapter 5.
Equally important, governments should not divert funding from other important fields to meet the needs of networks. Rather, they should see participation in trisectoral networks as long-term investments that will ultimately help them meet their responsibilities. In particular, resources spent on ensuring broad inclusiveness in GPP networks that protect the global environment, that fight and contain the spread of communicable diseases, that battle transnational crime, and that ensure food security in today's world are neither "foreign" nor "aid." Rather, they are a global public investment that generates a real return, and one that is shared by all. Governments remain the primary actors, responsible for a wide range of activities, particularly development programs. As UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy has said, "We must not let governments off the hook." GPP networks must therefore be seen as complements to national and intergovernmental governance structures, and not as substitutes.
Civil society and the private sector must also adjust to better participate in trisectoral networks. Greater transparency, in particular, is necessary. Principles of disclosure-based regulation, guaranteeing other groups sufficient access to ensure that their interests are adequately represented, would build confidence in such a structure. Corporations can also facilitate networks by improving their own internal control and management structures, to encourage dialogue with other sectors. Independent audits and incentive structures that discourage excessive risk-taking are examples of measures that are readily available. The greater the focus on better corporate governance, the lower the risk of market failure and the need for outside regulation. A growing number of corporations and business associations have begun to take the lead in implementing this agenda for change and have become pioneers in GPP. For their part, a number of NGOs have also realized the need for greater transparency and accountability.
As was hinted in the introduction, we may well be in the early stages of a paradigm shift (in Thomas Kuhn's sense) in the area of governance. The frontiers of knowledge still need to be explored, and ultimately, practice will inform our theorizing. At this stage, however, the prime task is to assemble the lessons learned from existing networks so as to explore the challenges on the way ahead. A clearinghouse could help with this by serving as a hub, a centre for knowledge management that assembles and disseminates the lessons learned in networks around the world.
In sum, GPP networks do not offer an easy ride, but the difficulties are well worth the risk, given the daunting challenges of a complex world with an ever-expanding multiplicity of actors, interests, and issues to be resolved. Many new and competing interests have surfaced since the end of the Cold War, and where they come into conflict, those conflicts need to be mediated. For too long, the centre of the debate has been left vacant, the podium having been abandoned to the extremes on both ends of the ideological spectrum. It is time to think about how the middle ground can be regained by engaging the different parties in a dialogue -- a dialogue that would help to reoccupy the centre and initiate a process of searching for sustainable responses to the challenges of globalization.
The stakes are high. Globalization is not, after all, the end of history. It is time to take a proactive stance lest we witness a full-fledged backlash against globalization. The status quo is unsustainable, and a change for the worse by forcing globalization back into national boundaries -- "moving forward into the past" -- is not an unlikely scenario. Networks can help to change this unsustainable status quo for the better by responding to the challenges and taking full advantage of technological change and economic and social integration. Mindful of these benefits, governments are throwing more weight behind GPP networks. Ultimately, it is up to the political will of the member states to fully endorse such a course. But it is the duty of the United Nations to lay out to its members the challenges that face them at the dawning of a new millennium and provide them with an achievable agenda for meeting those challenges.
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-9312-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

The Rise of the Global Dominance Group

2007-01-22T12:31:00.000-08:00

The leadership class in the United States is now dominated by a Neo-Coservative group of people with the shared goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This global dominance group, in cooperation with major unilateralism and US political processes. This research study is an attempt to identify the general parameters of those who are the key actors supporting a global dominance agenda and how collectivelay this group has benefited from the events of September 11, interlocking public private partnerships, involving the corporate media, public relations firms, military contractors, policy elites and government officials, jointly support a US military global domination agenda. We ask the traditional sociological questions regarding who wins, who decides and who facilitates action inside the most powerful military-industrial complex the world.
A long thread of socialological research documents the existence of a dominate ruling class in the United States, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. The American ruling class is complex and inter-competive, maintaining itself through interacting families of high social standing who have similar lifestyles, corporate affiliations and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.
The American ruling class has long been determined to be mostly self-perpetuating maintaining its influence through policy-making institutions such as the National Manufacturing Association, National Chamber of Commerce, Business Council, Business Round table, Conference Board, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations and other business-centred policy groups. These associations have long dominated policy decisions within the US government.