UNITED NATIONS - Flying 346,000 km and visiting 39 countries, Ban Ki-moon has put tireless energy into his first year as U.N. secretary-general but has struggled to raise the profile of the much-criticized body.
While pursuing an agenda headed by climate change and the crisis in Darfur, Ban Ki-moon has spent an unwelcome amount of time fending off critics of a closed management style they say comes from his native South Korea.
As the year ends, diplomats and analysts give Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister, good marks for persistence, but say many member states find his decision-making secretive and the man himself lacking in vision - charges he rejects.
"The overall image of the U.N. and the secretary-general himself is still scoring quite low on a scale of one to 10," said one Western envoy who asked not to be identified. "That is a real challenge for all of us."
Ban, 63, is seen by U.N. staff as a workaholic but has suffered from communications problems, his fluent but strongly accented and at times clumsy English contrasting with the suave and eloquent manner of his predecessor, Ghanaian Kofi Annan.
Chosen for the job over six rivals by the 15-nation Security Council, with strong support from the United States and China, Ban came to office vowing to restore trust in the U.N. secretariat and raise ethical standards.
That was widely seen as a slap at the Annan administration, stained by findings of corruption and mismanagement in the $64 billion oil-for-food program for Iraq and in U.N. procurement.
In practice, Ban has put his most visible effort into raising awareness of the threat from global warming and seeking to put in place a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force to end the 4-1/2-year-old conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.
He championed a 190-nation climate change conference earlier this month in Bali, Indonesia, which ended with negotiators speaking of a historic breakthrough and promising urgent action. In a self-assessment a few days later, Ban called that the "key achievement" of his first year in office.
Analysts said it had taken courage for Ban to push the environmental agenda, given that his backers in Washington are the chief opponents of specific greenhouse gas emissions caps.
