Fomerand, Jacques and Dennis Dijkzeul. "Coordinating Economic and Social Affairs", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Fomerand, Jacques and Dennis Dijkzeul. "Coordinating Economic and Social Affairs", In The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, edited by Sam Daws and Thomas G. Weiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• "The UN ‘system’ is highly fragmented, rife with competition, and certainly not a harmonious cooperative whole in which the parts work towards a common purpose" (561).
• The primary goal of UN institutions upon their creation at the San Francisco Conference of 1945 was to prevent war between states, with other specialized Bretton-Woods institutions expected to be responsible for economic and social development. The inclusion of these responsibilities in the remit of the UN was secondary and only meant to set standards (562).
• This remit of activities has expanded rapidly to include both the UN Economic and Social council [ECOSOC], and a variety of executive organization under the UNGA, such as UNDP and UNCTAD (562). 
• These organizations under the UNGA, whose responsibilities would appear to fall more comfortably within the purview of ECOSOC, were created by third world countries out of frustration with ECOSOC and deliberately duplicate its duties. In effect, as ECOSOC weakened throughout the Cold War, its responsibilities were absorbed by specialized bodies underneath the UNGA (564-565).
• Largely to deal with overlap of responsibilities, ECOSOC cooperates with a number of independent organizations through treaties, including the ILO, FAO, UNESCO, WIPO, IAEA, World Bank, and others (563).
• There were significant arguments about the relationship between the UNGA and the Bretton-Woods institutions in the post-war period, but the USA won out in the argument and prevented the UNGA from exercising any direct control over economic development (564).
• Because the UN system is not directly hierarchical, preventing the duplication of functions or operational conflict requires agencies to harmonize their policies, a task which decentralizes the responsibility to individual agencies (563).
• A number of reformers throughout the organization's history have made the same criticisms of the UN, the most prominent being the Jackson Report, commissioned by the UNDP in 1969, which critiqued the utter inability of the UN to manage technical resources or compel its specialized agencies to take action (565).
• The Secretary-General does not have central authority of the specialized agencies of the UN, limiting his power to those occasions when the special agencies and funds actually listen to his plan for cooperation (566).
• ECOSOC, given powers under Articles 62 to 66, is meant to promote higher standards of living, full employment, and social and economic progress. It meant to both set the agenda for activities promoting economic and social development and coordinate development activities (567-568).
• ECOSOC has some sort of coordinating role over all UN development activities, including those of specialized agencies, but this is generally considered to be non-hierarchical. Regardless, ECOSOC does not have the power to enforce any of its recommendations to other UN agencies (568).
• Basic coordination is maintained through the Chief Executives Board for Coordination [CEB], which brings together the executives of the various UN bodies. The CEB now has 28 members including the UN Secretary-General and the executive officers of the FAO, ILO, all specialized agencies, and the Bretton-Woods institutions. Its decisions are informal and non-binding, serving as a forum for communication and voluntary coordination (569).
• The the majority of its life, the UN had very little formal coordination with the Bretton-Woods institutions, with interaction limited to twice-yearly meetings of the three bodies. In the late 1990s, this finally began to improve, with ECOSOC now meeting directly with the IMF and World Bank (570-571).
• In 1997, the UNGA initiated a series of reforms of the UN Secretariat to improve its ability to coordinate operations. A deputy Secretary-General was created to deal with workflow, and executive committees were created to coordinate operations in matters of peace and security, economic and social affairs, development operations, and humanitarian affairs (571).
• The deputy secretary-general is a position without a clear mandate. While able to demonstrate UN resolve on issues, the deputy is pressured to both pursue development work primarily, and ignore that work in favor of assisting the Secretary-general with his administrative duties (576).
• The Executive committees, especially that on economic and social affairs, were complete failures. They faced issues of large memberships with different goals and rarely produced any common opinions on relevant issues (576).
• UN development programs plan their goals for in-country operations alongside all other UN agencies and national representatives to create a UN development assistance framework of common goals and priorities. These are then assessed through common country assessments (572).
• Agencies still have trouble cooperating at the country-level and often manipulate bureaucratic circumstances to advance their agency's aims over other goals. Skill sharing and inter-agency communication is all minimal (577).
• The imposition of the Millennium Development Goals have been the most successful attempts at policy convergence and coordination in the UN, since all countries have, in one form or another, worked with the UN to translate the same list of goals into policy (574-575).
• Major forces pushing the UN towards greater functionality and coordination have been the growth of information technology and informal structures. Often agencies use multi-agency steering groups or task forces to pursuing projects cutting through multiple agency competences (579).