Heads of Regional Commissions meet in Santiago to enhance coordination
20 January 2011, Santiago | Author: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Carribean 
The Executive Secretaries of the five UN Regional Commissions - Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) - held their first coordination meeting of 2011 last week at ECLAC Headquarters in Santiago, Chile. (Click for more)

The meeting took place back-to-back with the Technical Brainstorming Meeting of the UN High-Level Committee on Programmes (CEB-HLCP) at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters in Chile, and was organized by the current Chair of the HLCP and Director-General of ILO, Juan Somavía. Mr. Somavía stressed the relevance of bringing together the five Executive Secretaries, given the critical importance of the regional dimension in addressing the major issues of policy coherence in a globalized world.

The Executive Secretaries Alicia Bárcena (ECLAC), Noeleen Heyzer (ESCAP), Abdulah Janneh (ECA), Rima Khalaf (ESCWA), and Ján Kubis (ECE) met to examine ways to further complement and integrate the work of their institutions within the UN system.

The meeting began with a panel on the rising importance of the regional aspect of global governance for development, and included the participation of Mr. Somavía as well as Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UN Environment Programme (UNEP), who will soon took over the Chair of HLCP.

José Graziano da Silva, Deputy Director General and Regional Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also briefed the group on the interest of FAO in strengthening joint work with the Regional Commissions. In their discussions, the Executive Secretaries stressed the importance of the regional dimension of development, which is increasingly recognized as critical, especially over the past few years as the world has struggled to come to grips with the effect of multiple crises, particularly in the financial, food and energy sectors, and with the challenges of climate change.

The Executive Secretaries agreed that the various regional integration processes and the many forms of intra-regional cooperation, initiated at the regional and subregional levels, have had a crucial impact on key policy actions and policy dialogues implemented to address the crises.

“That is why it is so important that we –as UN Regional Commissions- integrate more fully with each other to exercise a collective leadership,” said Ms. Bárcena, who hosted and moderated the event. “Thus, with our intellectual and analytical capacity, we can influence the policies needed at the global scale to produce a more sustainable development.”

Along those same lines, Mr. Somavía explained that since the Regional Commissions have accumulated invaluable experience in dealing with regional problems, they can show the rest of the UN system and the international community how to deal with similar challenges.  “We must assume leadership in the intellectual rethinking of the role of the UN in this new phase of globalization with full appreciation of the excellent work done by the Regional Comissions,” he pointed out.
 
Mr. Steiner acknowledged the unique advantage Regional Commissions have in the sense that they can address from a closer point of view the particular challenges posed to development in each of their respective regions.  He stressed the need to articulate common strategies between them in order to be more effective and influential at the global level.

In the two-day encounter, the Executive Secretaries also reviewed progress towards ensuring strong and coherent regional contributions to the Rio+20 summit, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2012.