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  • Thinking Ethics was a project launched in Geneva to foster the debate about ethics. A few friends, fed up with only reading about abuses in the media, decided to hold a forward-looking seminar on five subjects: ethics and performance, ethics and knowledge, ethics and consciousness, ethics and disobedience and ethics in real time. If moral has to do with right and wrong, then ethics is its application in society. We believe that people need to talk about the subject to determine the level of ethics they want. The book Thinking Ethics, a result of the seminar, is to start the discussion. This blog is a contribution to the conversation.
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  • Andrea Spencer-Cooke
  • Pascal Marmier
  • Kelly Richdale
  • Stephen Whittle
  • Steve Bowbrick
  • Beth Krasna

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February 06, 2008

UN tries for accountability without transparency

The UN has announced that 26 senior managers have signed "compacts" on priorities. These documents, which I would assume set out their objectives, are supposed to reinforce performance, compliance and integrity. The priorities are laid out by the member states.  Description on UN site here.

Now I am all for "service type" agreements - everybody knows what to expect. The problem here is that they do not intend to make them public. When asked the UN replied that they would first make them known to the staff. You really can't have accountability without transparency. And this is really stupid - anybody care to wager how long it will take before some staffer leaks one of these compacts to the press? I think it would have been better to publish the compacts and be in control of the communication.

Posted by on February 06, 2008 at 12:02 PM in Organizations and individuals |

Tags: accountability, compliance, UN compacts

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