Empowering Civil Society in UN processes

The involvement of a diverse range of actors in international institutions and national governments is now considered essential for action on global priorities. In 1997, under Kofi Anan’s leadership, the United Nations launched a broad programme of institutional change and reform, a key part of which was intended to engage non-state actors into the UN system on all levels. The Cardoso Panel report published in 2005 again stressed that the UN should become a more ‘externally-orientated organisation’, stating that ‘constructively engaging civil society is a necessity for the United Nations, not an option. The engagement is essential to enable the Organisations to better identify global priorities and to mobilise all resources to deal with the task at hand’.me more ‘externally orientated’ in different measures. Most obviously, CSOs are now able to attend General Council meetings and operational partnerships between NGOs and UN bodies are becoming more established. There has also been a marked increase in more ad-hoc and innovative processes whereby members of civil society seek to engage in the UN system. These include multistakeholder dialogues, internet -based consultations, and local and regional NGO hearings. Examples range from the UNCTAD hearings with civil society, private sector and academia, to the multistakeholder dialogues at the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), to the private sector consultations for the Global Compact.

The new UN/CSO forums illustrate a more concerted effort to involve non-state actors into UN decisionmaking processes. However the quality and the procedure of the forums varies considerably across the board. In the best cases, the more innovative processes have enhanced the quality of decision making, increased ownership of decisions, improved accountability and transparency of the process and enriched the final outcome through a variety of views and experiences. In the least successful cases, such processes have hampered the intergovernmental search for common ground and excluded groups from the forum. In addition, due to the number of different processes emerging, each with their own distinct set of procedures, there is a danger that the interface between the UN and civil society is becoming confusing and unproductive.

Stakeholder Forum maintains that there are key components of any engagement process that can enhance its quality, and ensure that CSOs are adequately consulted and informed throughout the process. The Ford Foundation has commissioned the Stakeholder Empowerment project, an eighteen month review of civil society engagement in the UN system. The project will identify the most innovative and participatory mechanisms by which CSOs have been included in UN decision making. The research will focus on three areas of engagement; information sharing, policy recommendations, and policy making. Through a detailed analysis of a number of case studies and extensive consultation with participants and facilitators, the project will develop a set of good
practice guidelines.