THOMAS G. WEISS| ECOSOC IS DEAD 5. Realizing Ideas Matter ECOSOC as a whole as well as the development organizations reporting to it should integrate an oft­ignored reality into deliberations and priority setting: ideas and concepts are a main driving force in human progress and arguably the most important contribution of the United Nations over the last 65 years. This conclusion emanates from a decade of research by the independent United Nations Intellectual History Project whose directors(Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and the author) summarized their findings from 17 books and an oral history in their 2009 UN Ideas That Changed the World. The system that ECOSOC oversees should provide more intellectual leadership about the fundamentally changed nature of contemporary problems and their solutions; it should seek to bridge the deepening gap between scientific knowledge and political decision­making. Because policy research and ideas matter, the world organization should enhance its ability to produce or nurture world-class public intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, planners, and practitioners. UN officials are typically considered second-class citizens in comparison with counterparts from the Washington­based international financial institutions. This notion partially reflects the resources devoted to research in these institutions as well as their respective cultures, media attention, dissemination outlets, and the use of the research in decision making. Reality is different. Nine persons with substantial experience within the United Nations and its policy discussions have won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences—Jan Tinbergen, Wassily Leontief, Gunnar Myrdal, James Meade, W. Arthur Lewis, Theodore W. Schultz, Lawrence R. Klein, Richard Stone, and Amartya Sen—whereas only one from the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has done so. But he had resigned from his post at the Bank in protest of its development policies and is now deeply associated with UN policy work. And this list is in addition to individual Nobel Peace Prize winners who worked for years as staff members of the United Nations: Ralph Bunche, Dag Hammarskjöld, Kofi Annan, Mohammed ElBaradei, and Martti Ahtisaari. In total, some fifteen organizations, diplomats, and statesmen associated with the United Nations have also won a Nobel Peace Prize. No other organization comes even close to being such a center of excellence, a fact missed by many politicians, the media, and a world public looking for answers to global predicaments. In order to have ideas and the people who produce them taken more seriously, a number of priority steps should be taken to improve research, analysis, and policy work. ECOSOC might well put on its agenda steps to: facilitate staff exchanges from universities and think tanks for original and synthetic research; create space within the UN system for truly independent research and analysis; increase interaction and exchanges between the analytical staff of the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN economic and social departments and offices; ensure more effective outreach and media promotion activities so that the economic and social research produced by the UN reaches more audiences and has more impact on the decisions of economic and finance ministers around the world; and transform recruitment, appointment, promotion, and organization of responsibilities as an integral part of a new human resources strategy to exert intellectual leadership. Despite a rich tradition of contributions from various UN agencies and organizations, the system’s full potential for policy research and analysis has scarcely been tapped. Cross-agency collaboration is too rare; research staff in different parts of the world organization reporting to ECOSOC seldom venture beyond the walls of their departmental silos. Regular, mandatory gatherings for sharing research and ideas could reduce parochialism. ECOSOC should establish a research council to expand opportunities for information-sharing and collaboration, and reduce the chances of redundancy and the pursuit of different projects at cross-purposes. The UN should seek as many alliances as possible with centers of expertise and excellence—in academia, think tanks, government policy units, and corporate research centers. Human resources policy should also do more to foster an atmosphere that encourages creative thinking, penetrating analysis, and policy-focused research of a high intellectual and critical caliber. The model of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change could well be replicated for other issues. The intellectual fire­power of staff members is essential, which will depend on improvements and better professional procedures in recruitment, appointment, and promotion. These nuts­and-bolts issues of operational alliances and staffing 5