UN Quietly becoming a public-private partnership.

[LongTomH]

How the United Nations is quietly being turned into a public-private partnership:

An new corporate and government marriage quietly took place last week when the leadership of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations (UN) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to partner with each other. While this MOU is proudly displayed on the WEF website, it is nowhere to be found on the UN website. The only indication on the UN website of this important new development is a picture of the pen used to sign the agreement, and two pictures of the signing ceremony.

One reason for this difference is that the UN’s corporate-centered Global Compact has received a good deal of bad press. Now the new WEF-UN agreement creates a second special place for multinational corporations inside the UN. There is no similar institutional homes in the UN system for civil society, for academics, for religious leaders, or for youth. It is hard to imagine a national government signing a similar formal partnership with one of its business organizations.

At the same time, the UN is under pressure from Donald Trump who wants to deconstruct the whole multilateral system. For Trump, dismantling the international system built after World War II is a companion piece to his domestic effort at deconstructing the administrative state. For the Secretary-General of the UN, the pact with the WEF may well be his effort to find new power actors who can support the current system, which is now celebrating its 75th anniversary, in the face of Trump’s onslaught.

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The timing and managing of public perceptions are not the only interesting aspect of this arrangement. In 2009, the WEF published a 600 page report entitled the Global Redesign Initiative, which called for a new system of global governing, one in which the decisions of governments could be made secondary to multistakeholder led initiatives in which corporations would play a defining role. In a sense this WEF study recommended a sort of public-private United “Nations” – something that has now been formalized in this MOU. The agreement announces new multistakeholder partnerships to deliver public goods in the fields of education, women, financing, climate change, and health.

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Under climate change, it calls for ‘ …public commitments from the private sector to reach carbon neutrality by 2050’, not actions that result in carbon neutrality by 2030 . Under education, it re-defines the Sustainable Development education goal to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’ into one that focuses on education to meet the ‘rapidly changing world of work.’ The MOU explicitly restricts the WEF from making financial contributions to the UN, which might have ameliorated the economic impact of some of Trump’s threat to the budgets of the UN system. At the same time, it avoids any commitment to reduce global inequality, to make energy affordable, to hold multinational corporations accountable for human rights violations, or even to rein in the behavior of the WEF’s firms that act inconsistently to the re-defined goals set out in the agreement.