This sounds exactly like “work” today. Certainly matches my experience in big tech.
It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via website content. Organizations are oblique and very little is clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they all hide their addresses.]
I’m guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar translucency if audited from outside.
As a male breast cancer survivor, when I dug into the actuals of the Susan g komen foundation, I realized how much of a fraud the whole thing was.
It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.
I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.
The UN is many things. I guess most reports are a product of the secretariat/bureaucracy and the independent agencies more than the UNGA and the UNSC which is where the diplomacy happens. Although as usual the journalists failed to cite the @#*&#@(! report so I could read it myself.
Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning bureaucratic organizations staffed by a wide variety of people, a lot of funding by governments, a decent amount of authority to do these reports but not a lot of authority to actually do things.
> Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs?
It very much depends on the bureaucracy but there are quite a few UN agencies with actual authority far beyond what any NGO would have (with the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross which is explicitly given authority by the Geneva Convention).
For example the WHO is backed by other international treaties like the International Health Regulations (~196 signatories) that give it various powers like declaring a public health emergency. Its executive board is full of Ministers of Health, Directors-General of national health services, and other high ranking public health officials that directly exercise their powers within their respective governments.
There’s also the International Court of Justice, IMF, International Atomic Energy Agency, ICAO (aviation), IMO (maritime), and ITU (telecom) with various powers ranging from allocating spectrum to handing out billions in bailout loans.
The UN may not be able to enforce many of its rulings and decisions without a standing army but for the most part, many agencies do have a lot of authority backed by international law to actually do stuff beyond coordinating its member nations and few countries ever rock the boat. Out of the agencies I mentioned above the ICJ is really the only one that has the rare bit of trouble because noncompliance escalates to the Security Council where appeals die due to friendly vetoes.
Diplomacy is an art, not a science, and “doing something” isn’t necessarily the goal.
I’ve worked in government in varying capacities, and one thing that happens is that legislatures want reports. It’s part of the governing process. The fact that it’s being written and later has meaning and justifies inquiry which may not have happened otherwise.
It’s hard for people to understand because companies don’t work that way - they have their own mercurial processes. I went to a conference awhile ago, and the AWS sales dude gave me a bunch of swag. Palo gave me a fancy water bottle, Oracle gave me a dancing wind up dude for my desk. The hotel gave me a pen.
Does that make me buy AWS? No. It’s a token that essentially buys attention and goodwill for a moment in time.
Yes they seem very different. Firstly NGOs can do stuff. Groups like Doctors Without Borders come to mind. The UN doesn't do stuff because it's not meant to do stuff. It's where countries come to discuss things. Sometimes they do things, but only when all the important countries agree. I feel like people expect way too much from organizations like the UN, as if they're supposed to act like a world government.
I agree on the latter point, but I think it's unfair to say the UN doesn't "do stuff". A lot of the time they partner with govs to deliver the below, but they're frequently the provider of last resort too:
UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees): delivers shelter, food, and protection to millions of refugees and internally displaced persons.
• WFP (World Food Programme): feeds over 100 million people annually and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
• UNICEF: runs child vaccination and education programs across the Global South.
• WHO (World Health Organization): leads responses to global health threats (like COVID-19, Ebola, and now mpox and cholera outbreaks).
That's fair, but I would say it's not really the UN that does those things, it's the countries that sponsor those programs. Saying otherwise implies the UN is some kind of distinct body with its own interests, which it is not. It is just a medium through which countries interact.
Please ignore if my statements are ignorant.
I always wondered that whenever such reports or surveys come out why don't these organisations make the whole data and methodology public? Are they afraid that if they made it public, people will know how muddy these waters are?
If you’re collecting data on human rights abuses, you get more high quality first hand reports if you protect your sources.
When they don't release the data and/or methodolgy, you have to treat the result the same: garbage.
They could be completely making up data or demonstrating the gold standard example of pristine data collection and brilliant analysis but we'd never know.. and for some reason, they don't want to tell us.
> for some reason, they don't want to tell us
It should be pretty clear why they don't want to show and tell.
I'm quite confident on why they don't want to share their data and/or methodology but there could be legitimate reasons and I want to be open to those.
Regardless, without that information, we can only evaluate them based on how rigorus they've been in the past:
Are the researchers and organizations involved known for effective data collection and solid analysis?
>but there could be legitimate reasons and I want to be open to those
Then they the should just say what those reasons are. What's there to hide?
You can't expect to be opaque and then the public to blindly trust you simply on the basis that you call yourself experts.
Some of it is legitimately journalistic and protecting sources.
> I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites
Or you could visit https://charitynavigator.org instead.
Zero results:
https://www.charitynavigator.org/search?q=350.org
NGO is an incredibly broad category of things. There are certainly many grifter organizations (same as there are grifter companies) but there are also orgs such as the AMF which do incredibly effective work.
A lot of what I was probing called themselves that.
I’m not bagging on NGOs in particular. But it’s also how a lot of them refer to themselves.
This is more about the lack of clarity in messaging by orgs that ostensibly have a vested interest in making their progress known. At least as long as they’re engaged in public outreach.
IMO, most of the heart string tugging problems that get a lot of donations are not actually tractable if we do things people will tolerate. So orgs optimize towards looking busy while not actually doing anything, because there really is nothing to actually do. But no one can admit it.
NGOs are primarily money laundering operations for political purposes.
It’s one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the execution (or not) of policy.
Very powerful tool.
In San Francisco a friend ran an event for an LGBT policy non-profit, tons of private security yet no actual members of LGBT, only rich white hetero couples and the discussion was about finances and donations, nothing to do with LGBT policy impact, it was like pulling back a curtain…
Donating to a charity is kind of like outsourcing thinking. There is a market for people who want to help the LGBT community. How do we do that? Idk this group says they know how
Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.
There's a derisive term 'limousine liberals' that fits the bill here.
Try https://www.charitynavigator.org , which tells you what percentage of donated money is directly spent on the cause versus administration, staffing, etc. Charities vary widely, and it’s worth comparing charities in the same space, e.g., healthcare, hunger relief, veterans, because different spaces have different overheads.
Not so much the problem.
The bigger issue is a ton of foundations are just bribery enabling organizations. There's a reason pretty much every politician and rich person has one.
Donate $10k and the foundation can pay for a lavish speaking engagement in the Bahamas. The foundation head can give a 10 minute $50000 talk about how poverty is bad and then they enjoy the open bar and conversations with rich and powerful people.
Let's be frank, the average citizen isn't giving a dime to the George Clooney foundation for justice [1]. So you have to ask, why does such a foundation exist?
[1] https://cfj.org/
I don't know anything about the CFJ, but their 990 from 2024 suggests that they really aren't spending much on overhead besides wages and salaries[1].
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/813...
And Susan G Komen has a 93% rating on that site. What an absolute joke.
This may be true of organisations that are funded by USAid, etc; so they essentially allow the Government of the day to execute policies while attempting to avoid responsibility when the "my tax money pays for what" questions arise.
A lot of NGOs/charities/foundations are simply vehicles for tax avoidance/reduction or nepotistic job creation. There are very few that are truly altruistic, or maybe once were but eventually become indistinguishable from a corporation in how they are run, and what they pay their executives.
Seems like a perfect task for AI to do first pass assessment and summaries (albeit with follow up reviews).
If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the message, the likelier it is to be received.