Making Commitments Matter

Making Commitments Matter is an international research project focused on the implementation of
resolutions and conventions issued by the United Nations and its Specialised Agencies on the national
level. Until spring 2010, more than 100 students and young professionals from 20 countries are
conducting research in order to develop a model of a large-scale internet database that could make
information on UN agreements more tangible and more easily accessible to the general public.

Underlying Ideas

If UN agreements, particularly non-legally binding ones, are to be translated into national laws and
administrative measures by the 192 UN Member States, then a vast number of ministerial officials,
parliamentarians and civil society actors - the key players in the domestic implementation process -
need to have a sound understanding of these agreements in the first place. However, we currently
find ourselves in a situation where the type of information that would be needed for national
implementation is not readily available to these people. While ministerial officials and civil society
actors are certainly experts in their area of work, the vast majority are laypersons in the field of UN
agreements. The mere lists of conventions and resolutions alone appear to be an inadequate
information tool for the layperson. The problem is not too little information, it is too much information.
To this day, nobody is comprehensively filtering the vast amount of UN agreements for the use of the
general public. This situation is quite unfavourable to implementation. In the past two decades, the
world has made its entrance into the information age - the availability of useful information is a
determining factor for people deciding whether or not to take action.

Course of Action

Until mid 2009, the Initiative is conducting UN agreements research, aimed at developing ways of
presenting both legally binding and non-binding UN agreements in a concise and comprehensible
manner. More precisely, the Initiative is examining, inter alia, the possibility of categorising operative
clauses of UN resolutions according to their conciseness, analysing the paths UN resolutions tend to
take through the various UN decision-making bodies, investigating the relationship between UN
conventions and UN resolutions with regard to implementation, taking a closer look at how UN
resolutions regularly recurring on the UN agenda develop over time, examining UN summits and their
follow-up processes and investigating the extent to which the UN administration supports
governments in drawing up legal and administrative implementation measures.

Simultaneously, the Initiative is examining the ways in which civil society and state actors are
currently retrieving and using information, thereby allowing the Initiative to tailor the model to the
needs of these target groups. Civil society research is aiming primarily at which are not accredited with the United Nations and are hence in greater need of
tangible information in order to actively use UN documents in support of their advocacy positions.
State actor research addresses both the legislative and executive systems of states, as these are
tasked with initiating and drafting implementation measures.

The research results will be analysed and compiled into a first draft of the database model in
summer 2009. In its second research phase, the Initiative will gather the feedback of a large number
of persons and organisations, aiming at further developing and improving the first draft of the
database model.
For its concluding conference in spring 2010, the Initiative will apply the database model to a few
thematic areas on the UN agenda in an exemplary fashion and, along with a business plan, present it
to a variety of relevant actors, hoping to convince institutions with the necessary expertise and
resources to take up the idea in a concerted effort.

By enabling civil society as well as state actors to retrieve the information needed in the domestic
implementation process more time-efficiently, and hence lowering the cost of implementation, this
database, once programmed, could contribute largely to making UN commitments matter.

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