How to fix the Foreign Office

Gordon Brown has signalled he wants to tackle global uncertainty - but he will not be able to do so without deep-seated reform.

When Gordon Brown takes over as prime minister, there will be no shortage of clouds on the international horizon. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will vie for his attention, of course. But he will also need to push for a breakthrough on the slow burning drivers of instability.

Climate change, resource depletion, fragile states, global economic imbalances, infectious diseases: it's easy to write a shopping list of the risks for which the world has little insurance. One day, a number of these threats will combine in a "perfect storm". The modern world's vulnerability to shocks will then be cruelly exposed.

Protecting its citizens from risk is core business for any government. Brown has already signalled that he wants to lead a renewed effort to tackle the major sources of global uncertainty. To succeed it will be critical for him to know he can rely on Britain's foreign policy apparatus.

There's just one problem. He can't.

Instead of a coherent system, Brown will have a gaggle of departments that want to be left to do their own thing. Once upon a time, the Foreign Office had free rein internationally, but those days are long gone. Now every department expects to "lead" on its international issues. Fragmentation is the inevitable result.

Centralisation is not the answer. Blair has tried to boss foreign policy from Downing Street, but with limited success. He's been able to rally Whitehall around immediate priorities - deploying troops to Afghanistan, for example. But a few Downing Street policy wonks - however brainy - simply cannot cope with the analytically intensive work needed to develop a long-term approach to global challenges.

In a paper published today on, we argue that the answer is to drive a high-level mission from the centre, while giving government departments much greater latitude to interpret it in an innovative and energetic fashion. Brown's priority should therefore be to develop a global issues strategy for the UK that is decentralised yet coherent. It should provide government with a strong narrative that reframes the issues, explains our priorities, and builds pressure for coordinated international action.

A strategy, however, will make little difference unless it is used as a catalyst for deep-seated organisational reform. Brown needs his government to be able to work seamlessly to influence change overseas. Above all, the Foreign Office needs a radical overhaul, allowing it to become a platform for a cross-Whitehall synthesis on global issues.

The first step is to abandon any residual sense that a modern foreign ministry is "in charge" of a country's international relations. Domestic departments need to think globally, while non-state networks - whether benign, malign, or somewhere in between - will certainly see their influence continue to grow.

To be successful, the Foreign Office will need a much more sophisticated "theory of influence". The Stern review transformed the global climate change debate, hitting the right audiences with the right messages at the right time. We need to understand where the other "sweet spots" are, where a limited effort can achieve dramatic change.

People are a big part of the answer. A priority for Brown should be to sponsor the development of a new breed of diplomat. In the modern world, we need ambassadors for issues as much as to countries. We need our diplomats to behave like entrepreneurs, able to run issue-based campaigns with pace, verve and a considerable degree of independence.

The Foreign Office should open out recruitment, while making secondments a central feature of the career of any civil servant working on international issues. The aim should be to build a cross-departmental cadre committed to achieving results rather than defending turf.

This cadre will not succeed if all it does is talk about the problems the UK faces. Domestic agencies practice their responses to disruptive challenges, without something similar for global issues, partners across Whitehall are unlikely to ever learn to work effectively together.

These are major reforms, ones that will take much longer than Brown's term in office. But he should start them immediately. After all, governments tend to be harshly punished by their electorates if they flunk their response to a major global emergency.