[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the next page, the podcast "Librarian Archives" dedicated to advancing the conversation on multilateralism. Today, we're going to be exploring the financing of international organisations in Geneva by the findings of a report by Livio Silva-Mula and Aromo-Gasman, produced by the Geneva Graduate Institute. Livio Silva-Mula is a computational and qualitative sociologist working at the intersection of policy, effectiveness, transnational finance and governance, and he's researching his PhD at the Geneva Graduate Institute. And Aromo-Gasman is head of the Global Development Policy Program at the Heinrich Boyle Foundation in Washington, D.C. Welcome to both of you to the next page. I am your good partner. Thanks for having us. Thanks for joining us. Your report is very illuminating and it analyzes two decades of financial contributions to international organisations in Geneva from 2000 to 2020. And it gives a lot of insight into who are the donors and the way support for international organisations has evolved over that time. And it also contributes to the further conversation around financing multilateralism going forward. So at this moment, when you in Geneva, for example, is facing a liquidity crisis and some see multilateralism as being in crisis, even if it is more than ever needed, how do you see the relationship between financing of the international organisations and the evolution of multilateralism in Geneva? OK, I'll take that one. So Geneva has a very long history on multilateralism, starting from Anhidunang in 1863, Geneva Conventions, S.C.A.C., the definitions and all of that. And what we were hoping to do is put a figure in this sector, like how much we're speaking of, how could we start at quantifying exactly nowadays how much money is going on in this since it's been there for a long time and in shape in different forms, evolving in different ways. So we did some research, we couldn't find interesting good enough figures on that, and we decided to do some. We got this number, which is 250 billions of over the 20 years previous of the study, which seems like a lot of money. In the last year, specifically 2020, we found that about 20 billion USDs in these organisations are looking at. So to put it in perspective, just so we have an idea, the NHS costs a year, like 170 billion pounds, way more than international Geneva. And it's important because if you think about what is the broad overall mission of multilateralism in Geneva, global health, dealing with humanitarian crisis trade, we can start seeing and discussing whether it's enough or not. Another interesting number that I always think about is Brazil's flagship poverty alleviation programme, which is one of the best policies you know of, is 30 billion a year to reduce poverty at scale. So what 20 billion a year for these 15 organisations can and cannot do with something that we're trying to start grappling with. So that was one of the big motivations of the study at the beginning when we started looking at it. Interesting. So what else motivated you both to work on this report? The hoping started back when I was in the beginning of my PhD, I am particularly interested in the effects of financing on organisations, which is something quite complicated to measure. Financial flows, it requires a lot of data collection. So I was working with organisations on climate and on the climate sector. And by chance the con tone of Geneva was looking for someone that could also do this for organisations in Geneva. And the approach regarded institute, more specifically our investment, who is head of strategic partnerships. And together with the director of research there, Geregua Malach, they came to me, who was working with similar topics on my dissertation. And that's me if that was something we could do. Hemo, we have been working together since our bachelor's at the University of Sangellen. And he has expertise in the functioning of organisations. So we thought we could together start figuring out how to abuse the methodology I was working with. And he is knowledge of the intricacies of the UN to put a report like that in tribe. Yeah. Fascinating. And Ramon? Yeah, I did work in the UN before. And therefore for me, this was also always something that despite being within the UN system, it's just something that was always fascinating, but also kind of like something that was locked behind doors. It was really hard to put it just as Olivia said earlier, to put these numbers that are flowing through a place like Geneva into context, also kind of to see where the money goes later, but also the effects that international trends, events, crises have on multilateralism and how steady the system is, how much stability there is in the system overall. That was something that was really motivating to me. And that continues to interest me, which is also why I think it's going to be interesting to take this study further and see how funding evolves in the future. So I was fascinated looking at the report about how you went about establishing a methodology. Would you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah. So there are many ways of doing that, right? One possibility would be going to each country's official statistic and seeing how much they're donating. But the way we opted for was basically having this group of organizations, which Emma can tell us a little bit later how we selected them and go into their financial statements. So basically, for each organization, there's one financial statement a year. We used it a lot of computational techniques to collect these in scale. Sometimes it had to be done manually because reports are old in the early 2000s, the scans were not that good. And then with help of a few softwares, we harmonized this data. We did a lot of control signature. We were copying, pasting the right numbers. And finally, we conducted analysis. So it's a combination of computational skills, techniques, and well, thinking very clearly through the data along each step. And also looking sometimes really critically at the reports. We might come to that later, but there were some surprising things that we found in specific reports that sometimes seem to be a bit inconsistent within themselves. I hope we're going to hear more about that soon. So you briefly mentioned, but how did you select the institutions that you're covering? There are 16 of them. Yes, exactly. So as Levio mentioned, this came about through the desire of the cantum of Geneva and to some extent, also the Swiss Confederation, who are interested given their role as host authorities, who are also interested in who are the big players in Geneva? And how are they doing? What is their financial shape? How is it looking for them? What has been happening over the past two decades? So that was one of the main selection factors was headquarters agreements of these organizations with Geneva. Obviously, we're looking at a lot of UN agencies, but there are many more that are not headquartered in Geneva. We obviously did not look at those, even though they're also interesting. So that was the first point. Then also, we were looking at a certain size in terms of the staff that they're employing. So we're looking at organizations with more than 500 people working there. And then that led us to around 13 organizations. But then we also wanted to look into some of the up-and-coming organizations who are focusing on health issues, because they were very interesting in terms of how they evolved from some of them literally being set up during this time, whereas other organizations had been existing for much longer, them being set up and then really taking off very fast, which we could observe through our data set, really. Interesting. And which organizations were they? So these were mainly organizations in the health sphere. So Gavi, the vaccine alliance, G-A-R-D-P, the global antibiotic research and development partnership, and then also DNDI, the drugs for neglected diseases initiative. And I might be leaving one out. I think the global fund as well qualifies to some extent in that organization. All emerging in that period. Most of them, yes. Yeah, interesting. Right. So let's do a quick overview of the key findings taken from your executive summary. Broadly speaking, what trends does the data show over this 20-year period? Is there an increase or a decrease in funding? Broadly speaking, there is clearly an increase. So we started with around $4.2 billion in 2002. And also before maybe I get into these numbers, I should mention that we were always looking at nominal US dollars in reports. Therefore, we're not deflating any currencies. But given the numbers that I'm just about to tell you, there is very clearly an increase, no matter whether you're looking at nominal currencies or other currencies. So we started at around $4.2 billion in 2002, and ended at more than $23 billion in 2020 overall. So you have an extreme increase. You can also see that in Figure 1 on page 6 of the report where you see really the trends also in terms of the donors. And we'll put the link to the report and the notes. Are these donations coming from public or private? Yeah, most of them, the overwhelming majority, more than 90% are coming from the public sector. However, what is interesting is that we do see over the time that we were studying the private sector's contribution increasing almost up to 10% until we stopped. So this might be something that would be happening in the future maybe. And maybe an interesting point there is that while there's limited amount of nation states donating right to 190 or so governments, private sector donors are large in number. We find over 800 of them over the period of time. Of course, they are smaller donations, but the universe of possible private donors is gigantic. Every company can be a private donor. So we have a lot of interesting private donations coming a long time, even though they're small, there are many, many private donors. And which are the top donors? The overall top donor across the period is the United States government, a public donor. They are either number one or number two donor in all of the organizations throughout all of the years that we observe. And then we have a graph of 15 top donors. And in there, it's mostly Western governments, the players that you would expect to be there. One interesting thing though is that number eight is the Gates Foundation. So the only private donor in that top donor list, which also accounts for obviously the overwhelming majority of private donations. And is there an up to a trend then and donations from the sources? I mean, you said at the beginning, funding has been increasing. Yes, absolutely. There is an overall upward trend. There are some bumps in there. It also depends on how you group the donors in terms of, for example, informal formal groups such as the G7020 and so forth. But overall, the picture is increased, stable increase. So you've just started mentioning something. What's the distribution of donors worldwide? Oh, yeah. So we thought about many different ways of clustering donors and getting these contributions. We ended up actually going for two seven countries as one group, the 20 countries as another group, and all other countries as a third group. And what we see is very clear. To seven countries plus European Union, so the big European Western countries, they are always donating like 90%, 92% of donations regularly along the period of time we have. G20 countries, they also increase, but it's, of course, a way smaller amount in terms of relative share of donations. So for instance, we picked 2020. We're speaking about 600 million by G20 countries that are not within the G7, of course, versus 16 billion by the G7 countries. And then all other countries together, they kind of match whatever the G20 countries are donating. So there is this very uneven distribution where Western developed countries donate over a majority of it. It's not surprising. That's something we knew from different sources. And then the remaining G20 countries and all other countries are kind of sharing the burden on the 10% that's left. So that's about the donors, but what now about the organizations receiving the money, you know, which organizations received the largest amount of funding? Of course, again, it depends on the time you pick up. Let's speak about the last years. We'll see the global fund, for instance, is one of the largest ones together with UNHCR. And here it's important to always take into account the mandate of these organizations, right? So an organization like the WTO, for instance, has a more normative mandate, like usative mandate related to trade, does not have such a gigantic budget as the UNHCR, which is dealing with potential prices. So this is an important factor to take into account, because we are not trying to make the point that one organization is better than the other than getting money, because it depends a lot on what they're doing. So the global fund is a big recipient with over $6 billion in the last year of the sample, if I remind correctly, IOM gets about $2 billion, which is also a lot about their UNHCR, $5 billion. One interesting organization we have there is CERN, which is an I/O headquartered in Geneva, and they get $1.5 billion in the last year, which is also a lot for the mandate of, of course, implementing science, particle escalation. So these are the big ones. The other ones, the ones that are smaller, they normally have a different mandate. For instance, ILO, or even the VAF is there, or UNOG, which is the secretariat, right? So the mandate is important here. So which sectors stand out as important in international Geneva? Here we find quite interesting, because this reflects a lot, this thing about Geneva being a very traditional multilateral place. So humanitarianism has always been and remains one of the main sectors. And then you have the global health sector emerging in the early 2000s with this organization shaping up a new ecosystem of financing. So these are the two larger sectors together, humanitarian organizations and global health organizations on the other side. One very traditional with a long history, and another one with a more recent history of, well, the WHO has been there for 70 years, maybe, but the other organizations, they came up a bit later. So it's an interesting thing where you can see that Geneva managed a long time to create faster new pieces of multilateralism on its whole system. Yeah. Well, let's dive a bit further into some of these details. So your data set had entries from over 30,000 contributions to the 16 organizations. How easy is it finding information on financing? And tell us a bit more about how you collected and classed and analyzed all of that. Okay, that's going to be a little bit more technical, but let me dive in. So the first challenge we had was that there is no real regulation telling IOs and organizations how they should be part. There may, of course, there are accounting centers, but that's different than what we were looking for. So it might be that one organization tell us we got 500,000 from a private funder, whereas another organization tell us the actual private funder. So we had different levels of what we call granularity in each annual report of each organization. So that was like one first big challenge. And then when we say we have over 30,000 contributions, this means that we have over 30,000 lines that will tell us something along the lines of WTO got this much money from this actor on this year. If you go to the report, there's a figure, figure 10 at page 18, which shows, so to say, where are the gaps in this data, right? Because there are 15 organizations over 20 years of time. So there are actually over 300 annual reports. And for each one of these 300 annual reports, there are maybe a few pages and a few tables with all this information. So that's where we're taking the information from. That's where a lot of we leverage a lot of image recognition softwares, manual data collection, computational techniques to just collect the data and have it all in one big, one big excel sheet, where we could then eventually do all the harmonizations. One challenging thing was that some folks who say United States of America, others who say the USA, some people might say the B.O. and Melinda Gates Foundation, others might say the Gates Foundation. So there was a lot of computational work and harmonizing names that are the same but are written different. So there's a lot of labor behind just putting the data set together. But once we had that, things were easier, I would say. Yeah, because of IO, but we eventually got there. Yeah, a lot of work. Would you like to tell us a bit more about the trends of donations from the top donors? Yeah, sure. I think we have a great figure for that as well for people who want to see the visuals, which is figure three, if I'm not wrong, which is to some extent, what Libio had been mentioning, where you can see the trends as they are grouped our countries from different informal institutions such as the G7, G20, and the others. Now, overall, what we saw during this time was also that you could see a certain dampening or increase in funding depending on how the international economic situation was looking like. So, for example, you had the financial crisis of 2008. You don't see an immediate reaction. This is also due to the fact that many of these contributions are planned and pledged before the fact. But then you do see with time, you do see a certain lag. This is something that also you can see a big difference in volatility between the top seen donors more from Western countries and other donors. You have much more volatility with other donors. However, you do see these big crises that happened have impact across the board. So, this is also something that we will expect to have then for the period when we start collecting the data, namely because of the COVID crisis, which started when we were doing this research, but obviously the effect are only going to set on afterwards. But with our hopefully coming up, we will be able to speak to that trend as well. Yeah. So, how do assessed contributions and voluntary contributions change the picture? Yes, that is a very good point. And that, to some extent, also explains the dominance of these Western countries and the top 15 donors, and particularly the dominance of the United States as a contributor. So, many of the organizations that we looked at are UN agencies, funds, and programs who get assessed contributions based on its somewhat of a complicated key that is proposed by the UN Secretariat and then is agreed upon by the General Assembly and passed as a resolution, according to which countries have to pay a certain share of the general UN budget apologies, which is among other factors based on things such as GDP and other shares of economic might that UN member states have. The United States is assessed as the top contributor. They always have to pay mandatory contributions of around 22% in fluctuates to some extent. And then you have other countries who are also reflected in the top 15 donors who come next. Now, what we did find in our data was that countries such as the United States pay more than 22%, which means that they are also providing voluntary contributions. This is a tool that many countries are using to make sure that certain things that are of importance for their foreign policy or development policy are receiving more attention or receiving more funds. These are often earmarked funds that can only be used by specific organizations for specific things. Sometimes they also come together with agreements for, for example, top leadership of these organizations may be being within the hands of these governments. But this is something that obviously has a big impact on why the US and the other aforementioned countries are such high donors. You mentioned earlier COVID, but of course, the period also covers the financial crisis of 2008. What effects did you see about those events on the funding? As mentioned before, we didn't see an immediate effect, but we always saw a certain decrease, or at least not an increase in funding within two or three years after the fact of these crises happened. This, again, also depends on the fact that, for example, as contributions, you know, still are as contributions for these years. And therefore, these countries are at least trying to pay up as they can. One thing that we started seeing overall during the period of the late 2000s and early 2010s is that private donations actually picked up to some extent, which is something that maybe shows not necessarily that private donors are paying in more money, but that kind of puts into perspective the fact that public donors stepped down a bit. And therefore also shows, I think there were some examples of specific organizations who have tried to also shift more to marketing, in a way, to private donors, to be able to maybe also find ways for even small individual donations, for example, inheritance coming in as something that can help them through periods of financial draw due to public funding being cut. Very interesting. So let's move on perhaps to how you interpret some of these findings. What do you think that the report tells us about the overall health of international Geneva? Oh, that's an important one, I guess. It's important to say to begin with that international Geneva is more than IOS, right? International Geneva is also many NGOs, as many universities, such as the one we work, the Graduate Institute. And even embassies, embassies, consulates and missions to the UN. So there's a lot in there that we do not cover. However, nowadays we listen a lot about the crisis of multilateralism generally, especially with the rise of right-wing populism in many places who at least discursively have a lot of things to say against the international institutions and places like New York, Geneva, and Nairobi. And one of the interesting things we identify in the report is that despite this rise of populism among the last few years, the funding seems to remain more or less there. So the material bases are by us. In Geneva, at least the ones we're looking at did not seem to have been shaken too much. However, of course, there's pressure coming from multiple other fronts, right? In terms of what people are saying at the General Assembly, and in that sense, we think at least international Geneva is still there to have to reinvent itself. Of course, there are new crises coming up, climate change, digitalization, and all these organizations will have to find new ways of dealing with global crisis. But at least we see there is still some level of agreement among nation states that maintaining international Geneva is important, at least on the financial side of things. So how do you interpret the higher levels of funding to the health and humanitarian sectors? That is a very interesting point. And I think to some extent, it connects again back to Geneva's tradition as a humanitarian hub, but also to, we would argue to some extent, a successful creation of an ecosystem that allows for new actors to come up in a specific sector. So obviously, the humanitarian sector is the one where Geneva's tradition really gives it a very strong hand to play. You have organizations such as the ICRC, OHCHR, who are also connected to the humanitarian tradition of Geneva and Switzerland, and therefore have been supported for over a century. But you also, that sector being very, we would say, high in terms of the costs that it uses. For example, the ICRC, who is one of the main actors in this field, has field missions around the world. So does the IOM, UNHCR, with refugee centers and camps that they run around the world? This is very labor intensive. You need a lot of staff. You need a lot of tools, equipment, and kits for the people that you're serving. Whereas the other mandates are, to some extent, rather technical, the labor mandate, the WTO. These are smart organizations in terms of the work that they do on the ground, because they're mainly based in Geneva and are, one would say, working more on paper or on desk. Then you have the health mandate, which is something where, not only, as we mentioned before, are there many organizations that have started to be established within the last two decades, looking at this? But also, it is a very interesting ecosystem in and of itself, because you have the practice of re-granting within the system. So you have some actors, such as the WHO, the Global Fund, or Gavi, who sometimes re-grant parts of the money that they have gotten from, for example, public donors, to themselves or to other smaller actors who are specialized in specific issues. We have a nice figure to kind of visualize that figure seven on things page 12 in our report, where you can really see how they are creating an ecosystem within themselves, within Geneva, that maybe also helps to build up new organizations in this sphere. To some extent, you could say it's kind of like a Silicon Valley on health policy in Geneva. Brilliant metaphor. Right at the beginning of this conversation, you talked about some of the surprising things that you came across, and I'm curious to hear a bit more about that. Yeah, there were many surprising things. For instance, if anyone was a financial report by an organization that we won't name, where we found donations in the highs of the trillions of dollars. So we had to do a lot of due diligence, and like, okay, what is going on each year? We had to backtrack the years before, and afterwards, to understand what was the mistake that was being done. And these sort of things we would find quite regularly. Other interesting things we thought we found a lot, for instance, were small Swiss commumes donating to IOs, sometimes in the German to Switzerland, they would just make small donations even there. I think even sometimes you found some more restaurants making donations to IOs. Really? Of course, these are not substantial donations, but they are there. They're listed somewhere. They show up somewhere in one annual report, and therefore, we catch them up in the data set. And other things that we found out that were very unique and point to different types of research we can do, or pathways of money that are not very common. For instance, we found very large donations by small countries, which were, so to say, an outlier. One of the ways we were trying to figure out if the data collection was precise was we were looking into all donations by, let's say, Peru, and seeing if they are more or less on average similar, and then we find big donations that are not there. And we go local cases, a place where we copy the number wrong, that we extracted the wrong number, or is there something into that? And we found, for instance, this pathway where big development agency in Europe would donate money to the government of a country somewhere else, and that government would then re-grant the money to an I/O in Geneva. So it shows up as a donation by a big government somewhere in the global south, but it's actually money that comes through this path of agencies collaborating. And that shows a little bit what are the challenges in properly mapping the sort of data, because the pathways of money tend to get very complex. And if you don't go into the integration, if you don't really look at these numbers with detail, you might need to make a big picture, right? Truly fascinating research. So tell us, your main takeaways from the report? Just maybe one sorry point on that also, just to make it clear, the example about the trillions, like that was an accounting error from the organization. So we saw many of those within actual annual reports where you would add up the sums contributed from different countries, you would recalculate it, and it would not give you the same sum that the organization had provided, and it's not a rounding error. So obviously, some of the work is extremely complicated. You get small donations from individual donors. Sometimes maybe the donors don't want to be displayed, like a lot of this work is very difficult. And obviously, these organizations are focused on their mandate, right? So for example, the humanitarian actors, their job is alleviating humanitarian crises. But sometimes it was just interesting for us to see in terms of their own governance principles and accountability for themselves, that there are some actors that are brilliant, that are showing great, great work, but some that are really just either unwilling to display it publicly, or maybe they do not know this data themselves, just to come back to that. Important points. Let's go back to the main takeaways of your report. Absolutely. I think so. There's mainly five points that we will make. First of all, obviously, there is a steady increase over 20 years, a lot of an increase. However, as we mentioned in the beginning, if you put these numbers into context, you wonder if that portfolio size is still too small for a mission, such as humanitarian work, where that money doesn't bring you that far. Second point, most of the top donors are Western. Out of the 15 donors, it's 14 Western governments and then the Gates Foundation. Again, maybe related to assessed contributions, but still that was striking to us. Third point, the private actors are not as strong as we would assume, except for the Gates Foundation, which is the big outlier on that. Fourth point is that there is a huge difference between the mandates that we mentioned with the health mandate and the humanitarian mandate really receiving a lot of money, whereas the others also didn't get as much of an increase. Finally, what we mentioned before is that there seems to be a lot of space, maybe some room for improvement in terms of how some organizations report finances. I hope this work continues. Do you have final thoughts, or is there anything more that needs to be said about this report? Yeah, just to wrap up, I think it's important to always highlight how this was work of description. We're showing trends, right? It goes up, it goes down, it's this country, that country. There's a lot of work to be done in terms of explanation. Why it goes down? What factors are more systematically affecting this? This is one next step. We want to go into it. And then, of course, what is more interesting for folks in Geneva, which is also something we're hoping to extend with book collaborations with the Canton and the Graduate Institute, is to understand what are the micro-level organizational things that define funding. What are things that a project officer at IOM can do to increase funding? And if we can trace these things systematically, what do not we find effects on our data? What are things that folks in Geneva can do to make this work better? So, this is also something we are really looking into, which is just to sit down with folks in organizations, run a couple of interviews and understand what they believe the drivers are funding to be at their level. Not necessarily, if a country is not growing, of course, funding will not grow, because funding depends on economic growth. But still, from this portfolio that is limited, I'm sure there are things project officers can do to get more or less of it. So, understanding that side of the thing would be particularly interesting, and it's something we, now that we're updating the study, we would probably slowly get into it to decide on the thing. But I guess that's from our side, yes? Well, Rima, Sylvia, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing this report with us. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rima. (dramatic music) You
