WEDO's officers talk in terms of accountability and benchmarks. It is this linkage that some activist women say sticks in the craw of many nations. Complex yet poorly understood and even more poorly regulated processes of globalization appear as the new form of a free-market juggernaut. NGO representatives are now more sophisticated about coping with the UN bureaucracy and more distressed. Observers believe that diplomats permanently assigned to the UN are usually less knowledgeable about a conference subject be it women's rights, population, habitat, human rights, or poverty than delegates sent here for a specific parley.
Gender equality tends to fall relatively low on their priorities.
Additionally, ever since the first substantial NGO mobilization, in 1992 for the UN Conference on Environment and Development, NGO rhetoric has grown more and more blunt. As for conference logistics, the UN neither can nor wants to accommodate myriad NGOs in its basement meeting rooms and its three elegant chambers. And since thousands of NGO representatives will not have UN accreditation, NGO events will have to take place in various Manhattan locations. One is about as far from the UN as is possible to go in a southerly direction yet remain on Manhattan Island. Maintaining a custom, The Church Center at the UN will serve as a media information and NGO activity center.