Constitutional Change: The Byzantine Vortex

Abstract

This chapter gives the details of WFP’s original constitution — one of the most complex of any body in the United Nations system — and describes the saga that took place over almost a decade to unravel its complexities and reform its structure so that it could better serve a growing and maturing operational organization. In the process, the downside of the United Nations system was revealed — the uncontrolled power of an executive head of one of its specialized agencies and the seeming inability of the international community to control his aggrandizement. The reader might be bewildered by the machinations that took place, and dismayed that they should have been allowed to have gone on for so long.

‘In pursuing their desire to create a modest, experimental programme that would satisfy the myriad competing political interests of the time, the founders of the WFP created a complex constitutional structure’

(Charlton, 1992, p. 634)¹