Suggestions involving change in United Nations administrative and organizational arrangements must always be subject to the imponderable factor of the personalities, capacities and nationalities of the officials concerned. How many excellent paper schemes have had to be rejected because of this factor or have come to grief because of the appointment of the wrong person to administer them! The converse–poorly conceived schemes being made to work well by the right people–is less common, though not unknown. These considerations are relevant to Part II of this study as a whole, but more particularly to the suggestions made in the present chapter.

The position of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

One may begin by considering the position of UNDP, which continues to pose a number of questions of structure, relationship and organization within the United Nations System. Among such questions are those arising from the fundamental difficulties of making commitments to Governments and agencies for a period of years on the basis of fluctuating contributions pledged usually on an annual basis, of reconciling fully the objective of an integrated programme for the UN System with the autonomy and independent programmes of the participating agencies, those relating to the coordination of field activities financed from regular budgets and from voluntary contributions, and questions affecting UNDP's relations to the Council and the regional commissions. Such issues, and many others, have been analyzed, and solutions have been proposed, in the Capacity Study.