It was in 1989 – right after the UN–World Bank truce on structural adjustment in Africa – that I first thought a great deal about UNDP. What I thought was that the Programme's time had passed. At the time, I was using public sources to put together a data set of the regular activities of all the global-level intergovernmental organizations going back to their beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. UNDP and its predecessors accounted for about 4 per cent of all those activities. One of the most perceptive books then available said that UNDP had once played a crucial, dialectical role: strengthening the authority of governments throughout the developing world, while increasing the dependence of most of their citizens on them.

Yet, in mid-1989, it was easy to believe that the Programmes' glory days were over. UNDP's engagements with revolutionary states and movements were unknown to me and most other observers (the engagements took place away from the public eye), and other organizations had begun to eclipse UNDP in its traditional fields. By then, most UN agencies carried out development projects funded from their regular budgets and many had their own representatives throughout the developing world. Moreover, compared with most of its competitors, UNDP had little focus – a complaint I later heard from scores of staffers. Hamid Ghaffarzadeh, who began working for UNDP in the mid-1980s, for example, says that he rarely contradicted his wife when she said that he ‘worked for UNICEF; at least that made a picture in people's minds’.