UNDAF Gone Wrong : Detlef Palm

By Detlef Palm

We were four staff from UNDP, WFP, UNFPA and myself from UNICEF. Our Directors had commandeered us, in 2001, to work out the technicalities of how the staff of the four Funds and Programmes should talk to each other in the field. We were asked to suggest modifications to our policies and procedures, so that staff in our country offices would work in harmony with their peers from other agencies, that they would avoid duplication said to be sapping energy, and that they could more effectively help governments to solve their countries’ most serious problems.

We were the programme guidance focal points of our respective agencies. It was our job to know the details of organizational policies and procedures by which our agencies design their programmes, take programmatic decisions, allocate funds, spend money, pursue results and report on them. We knew the relevant board decisions and strategic plans. We also knew the weaknesses in our respective systems – the procedures and issues that constantly give rise to misunderstandings, debate, delays and frustrations.

We got off to an excellent start. We quickly agreed that the best way to avoid overlap was that in every country, the representatives of our four agencies would go for a joint meal and drinks. The four heads of offices would explain to each other their agency’s areas of expertise, their different worldviews, the amounts of money they hoped to spend, and the main counterparts that they were hoping to assist. In the course of the evening, they would use their paper napkins to jot down the programme areas their respective offices would be pursuing over the next years. When the representatives would had regained composure to attend to any business, they would hand over the napkins to their deputies, who would turn them into a document not exceeding four (F-O-U-R!) pages, called the United Nations Development Assistance Framework, or UNDAF.

• The first page would contain a reference to the relevant World Bank Common Country Assessment, which was considered to be of a quality far superior to any analysis produced by the country offices of the four agencies.
• The second page would contain one paragraph each by the four agencies providing the rationale for its engagement – such as some worrisome statistics or trends or a particular political opportunity related to the agency’s mandate.
• The third page would list the measurable key results that the four agencies would pursue, individually or jointly, though everyone thought that overlap would be rather unlikely.
• The fourth page would list some operational modalities, such as the main ministries or other development partners that agencies would work with, or periodical technical consultations on a specific matter of common interest.

We also recommended that our four Executive Directors should sit together, perhaps also over a meal and drinks, to discuss their agencies’ expertise, comparative advantage and strategic direction, to delineate responsibilities and avoid overlap right from the top.

We thought our job was done.

Everyone is acutely aware that the story ended very differently.

Neither the four Executive Directors nor the Executive Boards ever delineated their agencies’ responsibilities. Instead, everything was to be done jointly. This decision instantly resulted in country-based mission creep, where agencies stretched their mandate and interest into areas where they had absolutely no competence, but hoped for some  joint funding coming their way. In 2012, UNDP signed up for 41 of 42 results areas identified by the Albania UN country team made up of 19 UN agencies.

Shortly after we had issued our first recommendation, omitting the napkins, UN leadership extended the concept to invite all manner of UN agencies, no matter how small or irrelevant in a particular country situation. With twenty representatives around the proposed dinner table, one would listen to speeches but not have any discussion.

Meanwhile, the UNDP-dominated UN office of the Development Group (UNDG) aimed to emulate the UNICEF inspired country programme approach for all participating agencies. The difference of being a Fund (UNICEF and UNFPA) and being a Programme (UNDP and WFP) was lost on even the most senior staff. It let to abstruse thought-experiments involving national execution (NEX) terminology and evaluations, which often deplored that NEX was simply not understood by host governments nor – I hasten to say - the staff of the concerned UN agencies.

Most specialized agencies were originally set up to provide expertise and set globally agreed standards, but not to run programmes. With a mandatory UNDAF, they were required to use results-based-management paraphernalia, for which they were evidently ill prepared. This was around 2003, and no explain-videos were available on YouTube on how to get this done.

The programme focal points of the UN agencies were asked to meet again and – under pressure – created the Harmonized Approach to Cash Transfers (HACT). HACT resembles UNICEF’s original programme modality, where a country office transfers money to implementing partners and monitors whether the anticipated results will materialize. Soon, UNDG discovered that most specialized agencies of the UN system were not in the habit of giving any money to any government. To cover it up, UNDG pushed for UN agencies to themselves Deliver as One, from about 2008.

By now, the UN system had utterly confused itself: Who delivered the results? Was it government using money, goods and expertise provided by the UN? Or was it the UN agencies, hamstrung by the need of having national policies and budgets approved by parliaments or government officials? Never shy of creating ever more theories or frameworks, UNDP helped UNDG to coin ‘mutual accountability’ – a term that hence appears in UN speak, but not in the real world. It allows to take credit for results achieved, and to explain away accountability for results not achieved. Mutual accountability became the fatal blow to any clearness in UN-Government relation: Do governments report to the UN on what they did with the cash and supplies we transferred to them? Or does the UN have to report to host governments on what the agencies did with their own money? Whose money is it anyway? Do Executive Boards allocate money to countries, or to UN Country Offices?

Eventually, the UNDAFs have morphed into UNSDCFs (United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks) and have regularly been approaching hundred colourful pages. What was meant to be a simple exercise in coordination between presumably serious UN specialists, has kept the professionals away from real world problems. It created a cottage industry of consultants producing documents that - once delivered - even their authors do not want to read ever again.

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