The Historical Origins of UN System Budgeting

Abstract

Chapter 3 introduces many of the topics of the book by tracing the evolution of UN system budgeting from the mid-nineteenth-century international unions, several of which are predecessor organizations of today’s UN specialized agencies, through the interwar League of Nations to the main geopolitical changes after World War II. This historical perspective demonstrates the continuity in some of the budgeting dynamics throughout more than a century. It shows how principal and agency complexity in the UN are based on early design decisions in the League of Nations. It highlights how voluntary funding of the League of Nation’s Health Organization looked similar to today’s financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, suggesting that principal complexity has always included actors beyond states. And the chapter explores how the complexity of the IO bureaucracy responsible for managing money and discord evolved from small, host-state supervised bureaucratic units to today’s major administrative operations.