Foreign Policy Blogs

What does the AHDR do, exactly?

The Arab Human Development Report, a publication from the UNDP that consistently draws commentary from anyone and everyone interested in Middle East politics, typically inspires a lot of positive response from the development community. For one, members of the Arab intelligentsia collaborate to write it, so it derives some credibility from that. Second, it doesn’t spare Arab governments in its assessments of the problems the region now faces. Outside this community, though, what impact does the report really have? Moataz Abdel Fattah points out in the Arab Reform Bulletin this month that the AHDR actually reaches a rather limited audience. The intellectuals who author it are marked as members of opposition movements in their respective countries, so their criticisms of the government suggest a specific political agenda rather than, or at least in addition to, rigorous objectivity. He also notes that the warm reception of the report in Western [i.e. American] political circles does nothing to enhance the authority of the report in certain Arab communities, political, intellectual and others.

His points are well made. However, it seems that the most obvious point to be made is that the report is really long (the 2009 report, published in July, is 288 pages in English) and jargon-laden. Is it perhaps unrealistic to expect that a report clearly oriented toward a very specific audience would have anything but a limited impact?