Deepening the intellectual foundations of economic and social affairs
José Antonio Ocampo takes stock of his four-year tenure as Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs
Mr. José Antonio Ocampo leaves the helm of DESA at the end of June after almost four years of service. When Mr. Ocampo arrived in September 2003 to head the department, he brought with him years of experience as a scholar, Minister of Finance, Planning and Agriculture, and Executive Secretary of ECLAC. Among his main aspirations was to recover the department’s former capacity to lead the intellectual debate in economic and social issues. A priority was to support member states achieve their agreed international development goals “by providing analytical inputs, facilitating policy development, extending technical cooperation and ensuring a coordinated UN system approach.”
Mr. Ocampo’s vision for the department was to serve all member states as a “global think tank on economic and social affairs” just as ECLAC does for the countries of its region. He also set out to unify the department, or to use his words, to turn DESA “from a set of independent republics into a federation.” Four years later, Mr. Ocampo’s legacy as Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs includes a decisive impulse to the UN Development agenda – a term he himself coined – and to DESA’s analytical and normative role. In his view, DESA has also made long strides towards becoming the global think tank that he envisioned. Both the department’s publications and the debate at the Economic and Social Council have indeed seen their analytical level rise under Mr. Ocampo’s leadership. But he is aware that becoming a global think tank cannot be achieved overnight: “It takes at least ten to 15 years to consolidate that process.” The path towards a DESA federation is also now shorter, but, as he admits, there is still a long way to go to improve coordination among the department’s divisions.
All in all, he feels that there is more that the Department could do, particularly in publishing the outcomes of many excellent substantive forums and meetings for a broader public. Likewise, he recognizes that, under his watch, major progress had been made in creating an effective multilingual UN website on economic and social affairs, but that more needs to be accomplished in the years to come, particularly in terms of obtaining the buy-in of all UN economic and social entities, so that the site becomes an inclusive UN economic and social portal - a single, jointly-owned entry-point to all their websites and knowledge resources.
One of Mr. Ocampo’s main achievements has been to raise the Department’s academic profile. Flagship publications such as the World Economic and Social Survey and the World Economic Situation and Prospects have deepened understanding and analysis of issues of current concern in the development debate. So has the Report on the World Social Situation, which broke new ground with the release of its much-acclaimed 2005 edition on The Inequality predicament. Economist Dani Rodrik has praised the World Economic and Social Survey 2006 on diverging growth and development as the best report on this issue produced by an international organization he has ever read.
He has ensured that many good DESA reports, especially those that once had a limited, almost only internal circulation, have gained a broader external audience and are now also the joint product of various divisions. “I will be working to ensure greater collaboration between the secretariats of the functional commissions,” Mr. Ocampo had heralded at the beginning of his tenure. Sure enough now, DESA flagship reports such as the World Economic Situation and Prospects and the World Economic and Social Survey include contributions from the regional commissions and UNCTAD.
Under Mr. Ocampo’s watch and discreet guidance, a major reform of the Economic and Social Council is underway, with the launch this year of the Annual Ministerial Review and the Development Cooperation Forum. These new functions that global leaders granted the Council at the 2005 World Summit, according to Mr. Ocampo, “ must enable ECOSOC to serve as a bridge between policy-making and implementation,” and serve “to build a culture of accountability at the intergovernmental level as exists in other organizations so that all Member States are encouraged to live up to their commitments.”
A champion of ECOSOC reform, Mr. Ocampo views the Council’s new functions as pivotal to help the body fulfill its Charter mandate, and become a more effective force for coordination, policy review, and dialogue on development issues. “Coordination within ECOSOC,” he stresses, however, “is not an end in itself. It serves to improve the delivery of services to Member States and their peoples.”
Complementing the intergovernmental processes, Mr. Ocampo’s role as chair of the Executive Committee on Economic and Social Affairs, has helped bolster coordination efforts within the secretariat. Working through 11 thematic clusters ECESA brings together all the department and programme heads in the economic and social areas.
At a time when achieving coherence in the UN system is high on the Organization’s reform agenda, Mr. Ocampo highlights the many efforts undertaken in building good relations with UNDP and ILO, among other agencies and entities, and his having acted as the “ambassador” of the United Nations regional commissions in New York.
Mr. Ocampo’s role as Under-Secretary General has involved advising the Secretary-General on sensitive matters of political economy. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appointed him as his special envoy for Bolivia between 2004 and 2006. Mr. Ocampo advised the Government of Bolivia as it faced troubling political and economic challenges during those years, and advocated the creation of an Economic and Social Council to institutionalize economic and social dialogue. This Council has now been ratified by the President and is currently under discussion in the Constitutional Assembly.
Mr. Ocampo also assisted the Bolivian Government in the design of its National Development Plan. At the end of 2005, at the request of the newly elected President Evo Morales, he advised the Government on economic and planning policies and coordinated a group of experts to assist in other areas.
At the beginning of his tenure Mr. Ocampo strongly emphasized DESA’s mandate of “promoting an integrated approach to economic and social development,” and has consistently called for the “integration of social objectives into economic policy-making, as key to achieving inclusive development.”
Among other notable achievements that round out Mr. Ocampo’s legacy are his championing the theme of international migration at the intergovernmental level before and after the 2006 summit, his placing regional financial arrangements on the international agenda, shining the spotlight on the challenges of middle-income countries in a March 2007 conference co-hosted with the Government of Spain and a set of six policy notes to advise countries in formulating their national development strategies as called for by the 2005 World Summit.
Any major frustrations? Not really. Mr. Ocampo is glad that “all the processes I began are on track,” in particular ECOSOC reform. Yet, he acknowledges that much of the departmental work involving coordination still needs to be consolidated.
After his many achievement-filled years in international public service, Mr. Ocampo now returns to academia, where, as he is fond of saying, “my heart has always remained.” He is rather unique among civil servants for having combining his senior international duties with a steady flow of acclaimed academic publications – “a very difficult task,” as he readily admits. As of July of this year he will be Professor Ocampo at the School for International Public Affairs at Columbia University where he will share his knowledge and experience on development and global economic governance with a new generation of aspiring public servants and doctoral students, and be a fellow of the Committee on Global Thought.
He will regain what he misses most: the pleasure of being a professor as well as having time to read and write freely. “There is an almost paternal relationship between professor and students that is very fulfilling and I will be happy to live it again.” Indeed, he recognizes he will miss the team work in DESA and “the capacity to mobilize a large team’s resources.” Academic culture, as he points out, is in contrast very individualistic and is composed of many “lone knights”, rather than consensual teams.
Be that as it may, the comforting prospect for all those who have worked with him is that he is merely moving uptown and that he will, from his new vantage point, continue to deepen, as he has always done, the intellectual foundations of economic and social affairs.
For more information: http://www.un.org/esa/desa/ousg