Britain's Unesco plans still in the air
21 January 1999
[LONDON] Britain's preparation for participation in the World Conference on Science in Budapest next summer are being held up by a lack of agreement within the government over how national activities relevant to Unesco's activities should be organised and financed.
In particular, although Britain rejoined Unesco after 12 years' absence in 1997, in line with a pre-election pledge by the then recently elected Labour government, it has yet to establish a National Commission, or to agree how the funding for such a commission should be divided between government departments.
Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, said in answer to a Parliamentary inquiry last November that she expected details of the structure and funding of such a commission "will be made shortly". But no such announcement has yet been made. And Short herself has made it clear that her chief priority is the eradication of poverty in the Third World.
According to David Wardrop, the director of the Unesco Forum - a body with 200 institutional and individual members that acts as a de facto focus for information about Unesco and its activities - one result of the lack of a decision on the national commission is that there has been little follow-up in Britain to several recent initiatives.
These include last summer's Unesco conference on the future of higher education, participation in the International Year of the Oceans, and the UN organization's declaration on the ethics of genome research and its applications.
Another victim has been preparations for the WSC. The Office of Science and Technology has been asked to put together the national delegation for this. But its efforts to do so are reported to have been hampered by continuing disagreement within Whitehall over the broader issues surrounding the national commission.
At the top of the agenda is the question of finance. Britain is currently paying an annual membership fee of £11 million (US$18 million) to the UN agency. But hopes last year that the government would be prepared to produce an extra £500,000 to cover the costs of a national commission - about half the budget of comparable bodies in France and Germany - have since evaporated.
Even a compromise suggestion that the commission could operate on two-thirds of this figure, about one quarter coming from the Department for International Development, and the rest from a range of other government departments, may prove to be over-optimistic.
A number of leading British scientists are expected to be among those putting their names shortly to a letter being addressed to Short, seeking prompt action on the creation of the national committee, and asking that it be provided with sufficient funds to operate effectively. The matter is also believed to have been raised at a meeting between Short and Federico Mayor, the director-general of Unesco, at a meeting in London on Wednesday (20 January) of this week.
DAVID DICKSON
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England.