Urban green. Integrating ecosystem extent and condition data in urban ecosystem accounts. Examples from the Oslo region

The article enhances the knowledge base for the assessment of urban ecosystem services, within the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), recently adopted as an international statistical standard. The SEEA EA is based on spatial extent accounts (area of ecosystems) and biophysical condition accounts (ecological state of ecosystems). Case studies from the Oslo region are explored, combining land use/land cover maps from Statistics Norway with satellite data. The results illustrate that a combination of land use/land cover data for ecosystem extent and detailed satellite data of land cover provides a much higher quality for the interpretation of extent and condition variables. This is not only a result of applying spatial analysis, but a result of applying knowledge about the information categories from satellite data of land cover, to official statistics for built-up land in urban areas that until now have not been identified. Moreover, the choice of spatial units should reflect that modelling of different ecosystem services, as a basis for trade-offs in urban planning, requires a combination of different spatial approaches to capture urban green elements.

Strengthening Communication and Information Capacities in Malawi: Case of the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO

UNESCO is the only United Nations (UN) agency to have a global network of national cooperating bodies known as National Commissions. The National Commissions are part of the overall constitutional architecture of the organization as it was conceived by its founders. Presently, National Commissions operate in all Member States of UNESCO. They constitute a truly global family which includes a vast network of stakeholders, partners and experts. They offer a comparative advantage to the organisation within the United Nations system. Article VII (1) of the UNESCO Constitution stipulates that “Each Member State shall make such arrangements as suit its particular conditions for the purpose of associating its principal bodies interested in educational, scientific and cultural matters with the work of the organisation, preferably by the formation of a National Commission broadly representative of the government and such bodies” (UNESCO 2020:15). Thus, it is the constitutional obligation of each Member State to set up a National cooperating body (National Commission) or make such institutional arrangements whose principal objective is facilitating involvement of various government Ministries, Organisations and Agencies (MOAs), institutions, universities, NGOs and individuals in the work of the Organisation. While the realisation of UNESCO’s goals is primarily entrusted in governments, the National Commissions are expected to function as an indispensable platform where national interests, ideas and cultures are represented and interact. This review describes the contribution of the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO to strengthening communication and information capacities in Malawi to fill a perceived gap in information among some stakeholders both within and outside Malawi.

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system

Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

[Public health and the United Nations system for development in Morocco]

This paper reviews the work of the United Nations specialized agencies and programmes within the framework of their cooperation in the area of public health in Morocco

Working the machinery

This chapter explores how technocratic internationalism found new fields of application in international development and regional integration. During the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of international organizations began to work on the socio-economic tasks that functionalists had recommended for international action. With the expansion of the United Nations system of organization, global governance took a markedly technocratic but also a welfarist turn. In this explicit orientation towards human welfare and concrete projects, they differed from the technical standard setting organizations active since the 19th century. The concept of socio-economic development was congenial to functionalists since its promise of progress is linked to the technocratic belief in technical solutions. Functionalism also became a textbook doctrine for European integration, with the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 as a direct product of functionalist thinking. This chapter also discusses the professionalization of political science in the 1950s and 1960s, where scholars began to perceive Mitrany’s ideas as ‘reformist ideology’ rather than as a serious theory of international organization. To remedy these defects, American political scientist Ernst Haas re-formulated it as ‘neo-functionalism’. Although ostensibly an empirical-analytical approach eschewing normative commitments, neo-functionalism remained committed to the ideal of rationalized governance.

A global New Deal

This chapter shows how technocratic internationalism survived the crisis of world order utopias in the 1940s and gained influence on the negotiation of the post-war order. The first section discusses the critique of modern rationalism in the war and post-war years. In the field of international thought, that critique came in the guise of a ‘realist’ backlash against the ‘idealism’ of the interwar period. The second section documents the enduring prominence of technocratic ideas during the Second World War. David Mitrany re-proposed his functional approach in his Working Peace System, a pamphlet that addressed policy-makers rather than academics. Regardless, this wartime version of Mitrany’s functionalism became the point of reference for subsequent generations of scholars. Technocratic thought gained political influence when American policy-makers projected the New Deal and its institutions onto the international plane in the founding of the United Nations system. The final section studies the co-existence of realist and technocratic figures of thought. Realist Hans J. Morgenthau came to advocate international cooperation in the field of low politics, but also multilateral control over nuclear technology. In doing so, he drew directly on Mitrany’s functionalism. E. H. Carr, the eminent British critic of utopianism, in the 1940s suggested a technocratic European planning authority and a bank of Europe to unite the continent.