Resources

This review was commissioned from Education for Change Ltd by Internal Oversight Services (IOS) in UNESCO during June 2011 and completed in September 2011. The purpose of the review was to generate findings and recommendations regarding the relevance and effectiveness of the following priority initiatives on intercultural dialogue: • The General and Regional Histories (and related activities) • The Slave and Cultural Route projects (and related activities) • Plan Arabia • The Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) projects funded by the Government of Spain. The majority of activities in these flagship initiatives have been HQ-led and implemented with limited or no input from the field. Intersectoral work, essential to the effective implementation of the flagship initiatives and associated activities, was constrained by structural and budgeting factors common to most cross-sectoral work in UNESCO. Dissemination of the outputs of all the projects, with the possible exception of The Slave Route Project, has been a major and continuing challenge. The conception, writing, editing and direction of the Histories over more than 50 years have been the responsibility of an individual ISC for each History collection, supported by the UNESCO Secretariat in CLT. This highly participatory but complex process has caused delays and frustrations. However, the relevance of the Histories’ approach to history has not diminished over time. The interdisciplinary Histories have also been subject to the typical constraints within UNESCO of working across sectors. The use and re-use of the content in the Histories has recently been constrained by complex issues relating to co-publication and copyright covering volumes and illustrations and authors rights. The urgency of resolving these issues has arisen because of pressure from Member States to make the content of the Histories freely available online to enable access by institutions and individuals unable to afford the high costs of the published, printed volumes. The expensive printed formats selected for the Histories were predicated on the flawed assumption that university, college and public libraries exist in all countries that could afford to purchase relevant volumes and thus make available the content to researchers and the public. Overall effectiveness of these publications to date is impossible to measure, in terms of levels of takeup and use in universities or research for example, because over the years very limited data have been consistently or systematically collected, and little research or analysis has been done to determine the influence of the content of the Histories on written or broadcast material on history, on conference presentations etc. 2 Despite these constraints, the successful end in 2009 of this massive effort of developing, writing and publishing the history collections can and should be regarded as a significant achievement in itself, in which UNESCO has been effective in overcoming many problems and set-backs to achieve the completion of a project that only UNESCO itself, unique among all the international and UN bodies, could have achieved.