UN / ONU

UNRISD

MKANDAWIRE’S FINAL THOUGHTS

Eleven years ago, to assume his role as director of UNRISD, Thandika Mkandawire traveled from Copenhagen to Geneva by train – Denmark’s capital city was in the middle of a strike. After hopping off a bus at the UNRISD annex in Grand-Saconnex, he found an office with an empty desk. “And it began from there,” Mkandawire said.

What Mkandawire began upon his appointment as UNRISD Director on 1 May 1998, was a slate of innovative work involving research published in well-respected and influential books, reports and papers dealing with issues such as gender equality, the transformative potential of social policy, corporate social responsibility, and social cohesion.

UNRISD was created in 1963 and is an autonomous UN agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems affecting development. Through its research, UNRISD stimulates dialogue and contributes to policy debates on key issues of social development within and outside the UN system.

“Students, academics and policy-makers alike have been influenced by UNRISD’s research publications,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “We owe Thandika Mkandawire a vote of thanks for his hard work and commitment over the past 11 years.”

As he prepared to leave UNRISD on April 30, 2009, Mkandawire shared his reflections with staff member Erika Anderson.

Innovations
In the last years of his tenure, Mkandawire believes UNRISD created a new discipline, one that links debates on democratization, development, and welfare policies, which normally fall into separate categories. These blend to create a transformative social policy instead of a purely welfare policy.
“I was actually struck by the fact that people who write on developmental states don’t often write on welfare policies and those ones who are writing on welfare policies rarely talk about developmental states, and those who write on developmental states don’t often talk about democracy.”

His only regret is not having done it sooner.
“If I were to start all over again I would deliberately put that as the central message of the research.”

Challenges
Like any director, Mkandawire’s first challenge was to balance continuity and change; specifically, to imbue the agency with his intellectual vision. In order to do that, he had to convince researchers to follow his research agenda.