London

Matsuura: seeking to foster consensus.

Koichiro Matsuura, Japan's ambassador to France, is expected to be officially appointed next month as the new director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).

This follows his nomination last week by the UN agency's executive board, after Matsuura obtained 34 of the 58 votes in the third round of voting, a wide lead over his two closest rivals, Ghazi Algosaibi of Saudi Arabia and Ismail Serageldin of Egypt, a vice-president of the World Bank.

In an interview with Nature earlier this year, Matsuura promised that a more efficient bureaucracy and greater efforts to persuade the United States to rejoin the organization would be high among his priorities (see Nature 398, 554; 1999). “US re-entry is very important,” Matsuura said. “We cannot hope to have meaningful discussions without the United States as an active participant.”

He also said that Japan was keen to bring its consensus-style approach to problem solving to international issues. He pointed, for example, to the conference of parties to the UN climate convention, held two years ago in Kyoto, at which Japan, together with the European Union, successfully steered a middle course between the positions of the United States and developing countries.

Matsuura's appointment is the result of an intense campaign by the Japanese government, which is keen to raise its profile in international affairs. He had the active support of physicist Akito Arima, formerly the president of the University of Tokyo, and until recently his country's minister of education and research. And the Japanese prime minister, Keizo Obuchi, an old schoolfriend, is said to have lobbied several European heads of state on Matsuura's behalf.

This campaign has led to speculation that Japan may have promised additional aid to some developing countries in return for their support for Matsuura's nomination. Matsuura has extensive experience of dealing with such countries, having been an architect of Japan's aid policies during the 1980s.

But he is said to have performed only moderately well in his interview with the executive board, and his appointment is widely seen as a vote for the Japanese government, rather than the ambassador personally. Japan is Unesco's largest donor country, and contributes 25 per cent of the organization's $544 million annual budget.