Trends in United Nations Administration

The Soviet attack on the United Nations during the Fifteenth General Assembly, along with the Congo operation, has served to dramatize the emergence of the World Organization as a far-flung administrative instrumentality. Initially organized primarily to manage meetings and to provide clearing-house functions, the UN Secretariat has progressively taken on a wide variety of “action research” projects both in New York and in the regional economic commissions. More important still, it has become engaged in a complex congeries of field programs which now absorb roughly half the time of its professional personnel. Not only does it help to plan economic, social, and technical programs of increasing magnitude, but it undertakes to implement such programs around the globe—often in cooperation with one or more of the specialized agencies. Certain of these programs, e.g., the Special Fund and OPEX (Operational, Executive, and Administrative Personnel), owe their design in large part to ideas originating within the UN bureaucracy: spurred by the Secretary-General's leadership the staff has dared to improvise and to innovate as the political climate has permitted.