This is an institutional reflection of the individual tendency to talk about problems rather than solving them. Or, an important variant, where the urge to help those in need is expressed as directing them to "appropriate resources", which are also services that direct those seeking help to other appropriate resources, ad infinitum. The net result is a whole army of people who's expressed goal is to help people but who's effect is to send needy people into a loop of endless communication. We'd all be better off if they all quit and helped out at a soup kitchen, volunteered to visit with house-bound elderly, or something similarly physical and real. (This is in part driven by an individual need to "scale". We praise this desire to "change the world", but we pay no heed to the cost when ONLY world-changing action is praised.)
As someone who's done a lot of volunteering at soup kitchens and such as well as things like public policy research, my take is exactly opposite.
Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.
It must be said that as far as that goes, the UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems, to air grievances, and the idea of it as a universal problem-solver and half-assed world government isn't particularly a part of how it started. Unfortunately as we're seeing what the UN has become is a plodding bureaucracy that occasionally has good intentions, and rarely sees them through. Mostly the UN is a clearing house for NGO organization and directing aid, which isn't a terrible thing, although their history of corruption, abuse of locals, ineptitude, and so on doesn't inspire confidence.
There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
The UN is operating at a different scale doing something quite unique, and the reports don’t need to be widely-read to be important or influential. I ran kitchens at a series of homeless shelters for ten years and the difference between cooking/serving food, and actually procuring supplies and dealing with the supply chain - was the difference between something that took one hour and something that took nine months. It is much like this with the UN and other international trans-governmental organizations, they work with ridiculously complex systems and get real shit done, even if it’s not as visual as handing out a plate of food.
Having worked with WHO and ILO in Geneva... so much this. People have no idea - literally no idea - how mind-boggling the bureaucracy is inside the UN.
There are a lot of other contributing factors too. If a potential reader pre-assumes bias from the report, they may just choose not to invest the time. It's the same way bad faith political discussions play out with people making assumptions about the stance of a person voting the opposite way.
That's a great way of phrasing it, thank you. People have confused talking about the thing with doing something about the thing. It's an endemic in the liberal mindset. It's nice to have good ideas, but it needs to be followed through with actions. Otherwise the words simply amount to empty gestures.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
tbh this is to be expected? I don't read UN reports, I expect reporters to read them and distill the information. I don't read research papers, I expect journalists to read them and present something reasonable to a layman. I don't read the minutae of the laws being passed, I expect lawyers and politicians to debate the finer points.
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1 download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim through the first few pages of report listings in the UN digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
Similarly, even research papers are not downloaded that many times. Most are produced to be potentially read by the few hundred, at most few thousand people in specific subfield. In the end, depending on the quality of the paper, probably only zero to few hundred people end up reading a particular paper.
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
UN reports aren't useful for journalists because they are basically popularity contests between countries. The information in the report mostly just reflects the interests of the country preparing it, or who has a majority seat on the particular group it's being prepared for.
They are not like research studies where truth is the objective.
Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones" as it were, no one else cares.
I also wonder if this is an issue. At my work we will usually have some kind of artifact of notes, decisions, and action items after a meeting. While people will rarely go back and read the artifact, they exist as a form of documentation that can be helpful in a pinch. "Why didn't we do x again?" "What are the issues we need to look into?" All important details worth keeping a record of. That said, I don't really know what a UN report is supposed to be.
They can overlap with other interests and hobbies. I don’t browse UN reports directly, but I used to have access to a research service for work that would save and categorize relevant ones. Which actually makes me wonder if they are undercounting reads from other parties sharing the reports.
Who indeed matters; I’m sure for many of the reports, only several people in the world actually need to read them. I used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it was a good use of my time/salary. If it’d shared it somewhere and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth writing for that person. However, it would’ve looked pathetic sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed and walked over. :)
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports."
Well, I haven't read the report about this report either, but I have indirectly read about the information it provided.
I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a world-wide headline.
Isn’t this why democracy fails? It is exhausting. It is work designed for a paid shill. It is a burden placed on the governed by the government to distance everyone from participating.
It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.
I think (or at least I hope) this isn’t true for all of them, but some of the report-producing agencies at the UN are absolutely terrible at their job. Their demographic projections, for example, are a complete joke, and no actual expert in the field has taken them seriously for a while.
Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
Honestly not sure why this is any sort of surprise. I very occasionally read UN reports for work. I very frequently see journalists covering those reports using the press release, clearly not having read anything else. And then I see low quality media reporting on the topic clearly having read only the third party reports. When journalists - whose job it is - don’t read them, it’s expecting a lot for anyone outside of the political/lobbying establishment to read them.
Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should go look up what a military command actually does during a war. Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read reports, and write more reports.
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution
79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on
strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its
eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United
Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the
capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting
projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular
programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating
projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and
its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support
delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility
of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular
programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
> It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages.
UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
As someone who was a social science academic within economic development, some of the work is crucial to research, but is buried behind payrolls and other measures. Example; un reports on economic geography. Others are widely available for free, unctad, undp and so on.
Read vs. disseminated. We don't all need a first hand review of the report if it's reported on by reputable sources and share within actionable bodies.
>In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally more important that it overshadows posturing.
>I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental. There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from caring about the UN?
As far as I could determine, the issues in the second point do not exist.
See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.
I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.
The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
I work in this industry, a few scattered thoughts/explanations of how things work for the uninitiated.
These figures are actually pretty decent compared to the World Bank, who did a similar exercise in 2014 and found just under a third of their reports were _never_ downloaded [1].
The article discusses _only_ UN Secretariat reports, which, to my understanding, excludes most agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNHCR etc.). We're looking at a very small sliver of the UN system here, i.e., there are many, many, many reports produced by the UN that aren't discussed.
I'm struggling to find the source report for the 1,100 figure, but I think this is probably a massive under-estimate from _within_ the Secretariat, because AFAIU, the Secretariat includes the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who did >300 situation reports (sitreps) in the first half of this year.[2] I think it very unlikely sitreps constitute over half of the reports produced by the Secretariat.
Looking at the role of reports in the sector generally, it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system, indeed many are produced alongside universities. Without my cynic hat on, they've got three audiences/uses, all very similar to traditional academic publishing: 1) getting press coverage, 2) informing activities/policy, 3) informing other reports.
Like academia, you're looking at a very diverse body of work, in terms of quality, usefulness and (importantly for the discussion) breadth of relevance. You have reports with genuine, absolute humanitarian necessity, (e.g., sitreps) [2]; you have ongoing annual tracking on a range of issues [3], matters of record [4], so much navel-gazing crap on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] which are the global goals for the UN.
A lot of it is turgid, obtuse, expensively-produced crap; some of it is the canonical take on a particular issue (e.g., climate change, migration from Northern Africa to Europe) and will be used by governments when developing their policy response. Some of it will only get used by a few niche NGOs when writing their proposals for their next years' work, or as a footnote in another report which will be read by a very limited audience. Some of it will be used by humanitarian agencies to ensure they're not all delivering aid to the same region.
It's hard to defend the UN sometimes, it's certainly very easy to criticise. All in all, I agree with the comments in the thread that note that these reports aren't for a general audience. I also agree that reader count isn't necessarily a good metric: a good report with good policy recommendations that's read and implemented by a small number of policy-makers beats the shit out of the thousandth report on SDG implementation that's read by a lot of actors because it's broad enough to be relevant to more people.
Not all are a particularly good use of funds and human effort, but the same could be said of a huge chunk of academic publishing. It's also (mostly) targeted at improving the world. I'd encourage anyone getting too pissy in the thread to consider the amount of resources tech industry invests in getting people to click ads, to con people into subscriptions, to squeeze customers, undermine labour, encourage addictive behaviours and sell us stuff we don't need.
It's a very different world to the tech scene: as flawed, as diverse, as occasionally brilliant, arguably more necessary, arguably less impactful. Frustrating and fascinating in equal measure.
Perhaps impact would be a better metric for assessing whether or not these 1000s of person-hours are well-spent. I suspect the conclusion would be same.
> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system
Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response
And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth
Wide readerships are overrated though. The identity of the reader(s) and the credibility of the findings are much more important variables for influence than "big numbers", esp. today
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
Next headline: Most Read UN Report Is About UN Reports Not Being Read
If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring and won’t. ;)
In other news, I’ve begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to useless. It’s a great idea and we should have it, but the amount of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
South Africa's case to the ICJ (a UN body) was largely based on presenting to the the judges what other UN bodies had already reported and concluded on Palestinian genocide. As in report after report…
It left the ICJ in a pickle: dismissing the case on a lack of evidence meant concluding that a lot of the UN was either incompetent or dishonest.
A smart legal strategy, regardless of one's political opinion on the matter.
It doesn't seem like a bad metric, though. There will be some "fluff" reports that are widely read but don't say much, but I doubt the inverse is true: reports 2 people read but are extremely impactful. I'd say that's really bad if it happens.
Given that the UN is an utterly dystopian horror organisation that should be dismantled before it drives humanity into a dead-end with no return, and given that our "journalistic" institutions no longer practice journalism, but merely amplify propaganda, it would actually be better if the general public would scrutinise those reports more closely.
neonate|7 months ago
simpaticoder|7 months ago
ants_everywhere|7 months ago
Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.
EA-3167|7 months ago
There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
vr46|7 months ago
egorfine|7 months ago
Having worked with WHO and ILO in Geneva... so much this. People have no idea - literally no idea - how mind-boggling the bureaucracy is inside the UN.
This is a dysfunctional org.
brightball|7 months ago
usmur|6 months ago
There the tendency of dereponsibilising tasks and delegate the hard part to someone else, as you say "directing to appropriate resources".
glitchc|7 months ago
BolsunBacset|7 months ago
[deleted]
browningstreet|7 months ago
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.
dgfitz|7 months ago
It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.
zeroCalories|7 months ago
cantor_S_drug|7 months ago
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?
fsflover|7 months ago
Or you could visit https://charitynavigator.org instead.
bootsmann|7 months ago
AndrewKemendo|7 months ago
It’s one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the execution (or not) of policy.
Very powerful tool.
pstuart|7 months ago
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.
clort|7 months ago
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
t-3|7 months ago
abdullahkhalids|7 months ago
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
esseph|7 months ago
Damn.
ars|7 months ago
They are not like research studies where truth is the objective.
Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones" as it were, no one else cares.
zeroCalories|7 months ago
sunaookami|7 months ago
SoftTalker|7 months ago
Like almost everyone, I have zero involvement in UN activities, and zero influence over them. Why would I read their reports?
1123581321|7 months ago
Who indeed matters; I’m sure for many of the reports, only several people in the world actually need to read them. I used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it was a good use of my time/salary. If it’d shared it somewhere and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth writing for that person. However, it would’ve looked pathetic sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed and walked over. :)
michaeldoron|7 months ago
Pinus|7 months ago
jakeydus|7 months ago
dwheeler|7 months ago
Many reports are written for a narrow audience. That's fine if it provides key information necessary to make a good decision with wide impact.
kachapopopow|7 months ago
I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a world-wide headline.
willguest|7 months ago
The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
nashashmi|7 months ago
It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.
Analemma_|7 months ago
Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
lazide|7 months ago
atleastoptimal|7 months ago
saaaaaam|7 months ago
whatshisface|7 months ago
Journalism: Reading the press release.
Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
XorNot|7 months ago
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
aspenmayer|7 months ago
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4086174
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
kingstnap|7 months ago
https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
nashashmi|7 months ago
No one cared about the resolutions regarding Israel until now. But now that they do, it is there for Your benefit.
duskwuff|7 months ago
UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
dotcoma|7 months ago
unixhero|7 months ago
footnote43|7 months ago
anshumankmr|7 months ago
Frieren|7 months ago
- Environment should be protected.
- Corruption harms countries and economies.
- Extreme poverty could be eradicated with coordinated efforts.
Half of the parties in any goverment: let's just ignore all of that.
wnc3141|7 months ago
shikon7|7 months ago
excalibur|7 months ago
resource_waste|7 months ago
>In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally more important that it overshadows posturing.
>I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental. There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from caring about the UN?
fn-mote|7 months ago
See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.
I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.
The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
[1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155...
[2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/
kenanblair|7 months ago
xyst|7 months ago
specproc|7 months ago
These figures are actually pretty decent compared to the World Bank, who did a similar exercise in 2014 and found just under a third of their reports were _never_ downloaded [1].
The article discusses _only_ UN Secretariat reports, which, to my understanding, excludes most agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNHCR etc.). We're looking at a very small sliver of the UN system here, i.e., there are many, many, many reports produced by the UN that aren't discussed.
I'm struggling to find the source report for the 1,100 figure, but I think this is probably a massive under-estimate from _within_ the Secretariat, because AFAIU, the Secretariat includes the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who did >300 situation reports (sitreps) in the first half of this year.[2] I think it very unlikely sitreps constitute over half of the reports produced by the Secretariat.
Looking at the role of reports in the sector generally, it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system, indeed many are produced alongside universities. Without my cynic hat on, they've got three audiences/uses, all very similar to traditional academic publishing: 1) getting press coverage, 2) informing activities/policy, 3) informing other reports.
Like academia, you're looking at a very diverse body of work, in terms of quality, usefulness and (importantly for the discussion) breadth of relevance. You have reports with genuine, absolute humanitarian necessity, (e.g., sitreps) [2]; you have ongoing annual tracking on a range of issues [3], matters of record [4], so much navel-gazing crap on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] which are the global goals for the UN.
A lot of it is turgid, obtuse, expensively-produced crap; some of it is the canonical take on a particular issue (e.g., climate change, migration from Northern Africa to Europe) and will be used by governments when developing their policy response. Some of it will only get used by a few niche NGOs when writing their proposals for their next years' work, or as a footnote in another report which will be read by a very limited audience. Some of it will be used by humanitarian agencies to ensure they're not all delivering aid to the same region.
It's hard to defend the UN sometimes, it's certainly very easy to criticise. All in all, I agree with the comments in the thread that note that these reports aren't for a general audience. I also agree that reader count isn't necessarily a good metric: a good report with good policy recommendations that's read and implemented by a small number of policy-makers beats the shit out of the thousandth report on SDG implementation that's read by a lot of actors because it's broad enough to be relevant to more people.
Not all are a particularly good use of funds and human effort, but the same could be said of a huge chunk of academic publishing. It's also (mostly) targeted at improving the world. I'd encourage anyone getting too pissy in the thread to consider the amount of resources tech industry invests in getting people to click ads, to con people into subscriptions, to squeeze customers, undermine labour, encourage addictive behaviours and sell us stuff we don't need.
It's a very different world to the tech scene: as flawed, as diverse, as occasionally brilliant, arguably more necessary, arguably less impactful. Frustrating and fascinating in equal measure.
[^1]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fa4...
[^2]: https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%...
[^3]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923
[^4]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960
[^5]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061
willguest|7 months ago
> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system
Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response
And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth
zahirbmirza|7 months ago
marcosdumay|7 months ago
HSO|7 months ago
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
elcritch|7 months ago
If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring and won’t. ;)
In other news, I’ve begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to useless. It’s a great idea and we should have it, but the amount of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
anonu|7 months ago
ta20240528|7 months ago
South Africa's case to the ICJ (a UN body) was largely based on presenting to the the judges what other UN bodies had already reported and concluded on Palestinian genocide. As in report after report…
It left the ICJ in a pickle: dismissing the case on a lack of evidence meant concluding that a lot of the UN was either incompetent or dishonest.
A smart legal strategy, regardless of one's political opinion on the matter.
Careers depend on not reading some reports :)
j16sdiz|7 months ago
I think this is just wrong. The number of download does not reflect how important or impactful a report is.
robertlagrant|7 months ago
tardismechanic|7 months ago
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TheRealNGenius|7 months ago
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olddustytrail|7 months ago
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deadbabe|7 months ago