UN. Business. Better?

I recently noticed Jonathan's update about the UN's recent launch of their new website to bring business and the UN closer together. A long time fan of the UN (and critic, but what's a good fan who can't be a good critic? ) I went to check it out. It looks like they've taken a lot of what they've been doing for years and made it easier to understand and engage with. Always important for sustainable development. We all want our lives to be easier.

As their website says, 'partnership' can mean anything from donations (collectives of businesses helping to produce AIDS material or businesses giving to support the people in Haiti) to long term strategic work. And the UN tries to make sure they dont enter into partnership with those businesses that (to the UN's knowledge) violate basic UN principles (like human rights).

It brings up a larger and long-term issue: that whole public-private partnership as it applies to big international organisations such as the UN. Public-private is important. It's been important for just about as long as the two sides of the same coin (people organising themselves to create something and using some form of money be it through taxes or through consumption to do it) have existed. It reminds us that a) 'business helping society' is hardly new. Banks are one easy example - Indian Solar Loans, for example, gives loans to relatively poor people to buy solar energy devices for their homes and small businesses. Hundereds have clean lighting now who didn't have it before - and the banks (businesses) who are reaping some of those rewards as people re-pay their loans, and sustainable development is re-affirmed in the process.  It also reminds me that business engagement with the public sector often is for the ends of the business - not society in general. Take Big Oil or the Financial Regulation, who work closer with government than government works with government.

I'd like to see more 'real' partnerships - more long term work. There is some, of course. Much of the current plethora of responses to Haiti are evidence of the short term response that is common in disaster areas, but disasters-responses are best when businesses can have a long term relationship to both the UN system and to their partner organisation (remembering that a lot of the work happens with partner organisations). But there needs to be more. Maybe the new website can help facilitate that, but I don't see that as the website's main point. But to change the face of business - and to change the face of the UN - might take more resources than the UN has right now.... or that business is able to really contribute.