Increase in scope and interdependence of international activities

All the problems just discussed are still with us, but big changes in the context and dimensions of many of them have occurred since the general structure of international organization was determined in the 1940s. Of these changes, and their effects on the coordination issue, one may note, first, the vast increases in the scope of international economic and social activities since the mid-1940s, an increase that has naturally been accompanied by a constant broadening of the programmes and an ever-greater interdependence of the activities of different agencies. The task of the UN has been increasingly to promote and to help organize and guide the use of the skills and thinking of the agencies, and of its own subbodies and services, in the solution of world problems which straddle the competence of numerous national departments and international organizations. Except in a few cases, such as the campaign against illiteracy (UNESCO), and the World Employment Programme (the ILO), the broad inter-agency programmes–for example, the International Development Strategy, the World Plan of Action in the field of science and technology, the United Nations Environment Programme, community and rural development–have been led by the United Nations itself. Some of these programmes have underlined the problem, referred to in the last chapter, of reconciling the role of the Council as coordinator and initiator with its role as a governing body responsible for a sector of the United Nations System's substantive work and properly subject to coordination as much as any specialized agency.