Administrative Problems of the Technical Assistance Administration

Extract

Although it was not his intention, Edward Gibbon once defined the whole duty and substance of any governmental body when he wrote “a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.” Of these attributes and responsibilities the third is not the least important. Nor is this anywhere more true than in the case of the United Nations, an international organization representing and serving sixty diverse states and performing functions both unique and novel. Above all it is true of the United Nations operational agency known as the Technical Assistance Administration.

The executive, that is the organizational and operational, problems of the Technical Assistance Administration break into two distinct categories. There is, first, the exceedingly difficult situation that is created by the administrative weakness of many of the governments of the underdeveloped countries which the TAA has been organized to aid. This weakness may be the result of inexperience, corruption, the general backwardness of the national economy, the primitive cultural structure, personal incompetence, or any combination of these factors. The second type of difficulty is that found in the formidable but essentially straightforward set of problems that will inevitably face an agency staffed by men and women drawn from a variety of national and personal environments, and charged with the conduct of business of an almost unique diversity, in areas globally dispersed.