The UN80 Initiative, on which UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefed member states in early May, was as unexpected as it was praised by many experts as overdue. It suggests a massive overhaul and restructuring of the UN, driven primarily by the liquidity crises in the UN Secretariat and budget cuts to other parts of the UN. But the initiative also responds to larger threats to the multilateral system. Widespread perceptions that the UN is grossly inefficient—a self-referential system with little real-world impact—combine dangerously with rising nationalism and distrust toward multilateral institutions in many parts of the world. All of this is taking place in the context of global power shifts along both North–South and East–West dimensions.
This piece focuses on what UN80 means for the UN’s development pillar, which is expected to be a part of the reform. The overall thrust of the reform, centering on efficiency, as well as some ideas from a leaked internal document, are plausible, have found traction among experts (with notable exceptions), and deserve respect for their unparalleled ambition. Proposals on the table include merging UN entities, relocating staff from headquarters to cheaper cities, and “boosting” the leadership role of resident coordinators and national ownership.
Yet based on past reform experiences, caution is advised. The reform process should avoid two mistakes. First, reform efforts should avoid drifting toward old and convenient recipes focused mainly on coordination and decentralization. Real change requires tackling performance deficits. Second, the reform process should not be seen only as a technical exercise. As Richard Gowan argued, reform should be guided by thinking about the desired roles and function of the UN rather than just cutting costs.
Moving beyond Coordination and Decentralization
The long history of UN development system reform is largely one of strengthening the resident coordinator (RC) system to improve coordination—most recently through a package of reforms agreed upon in 2018. Under this system, the RC coordinates all UN entities that are part of the UN country team. The basic idea is sound: fragmentation calls for coordination to make the UN development system more relevant, efficient, and effective. However, it has not worked in practice, at least when compared to the stated reform goals of delivering as one. Despite various institutional reforms, the behavior of UN development agencies has not changed significantly. Further strengthening the RC system would amount to doing the same thing and expecting different results.
If the RC system is a centripetal force bringing together UN agencies to “deliver as one,” then there are also centrifugal forces that pull them apart. These centrifugal forces have been stronger than the RC system, but they have never been confronted in earnest by member states.
The issue is partly a fundamental design error in the UN development system that results in conflicting accountability lines. The heads of UN field offices that constitute UN country teams operate under the leadership of the RC but are employees of their respective entity. However, there are deeper issues that leave RCs little chance to live up to expectations. In a nutshell, if the UN were more focused on impact, coordination would be easier. When talking to UN field staff, one is struck by how often they are aware of the need to coordinate with other UN entities to achieve results they cannot achieve alone. The real problem is that UN entities are not sufficiently geared toward results. Their “business model,” to use UN parlance, reflects a quasi-commercial way of operating that is hard to reconcile with the mission-driven idea of the RC system.
Consider two examples. In South Sudan, aid entities, the UN among them, created a proliferation of peace-focused institutions with overlapping mandates because there was a different donor behind each. In Serbia, one UN entity established 14 pilot projects, “primarily thanks to outside resources,” but only one was fully scaled up. This demonstrates how the UN has become “responsive but not responsible”—responsive to donors and host governments but not responsible toward its mission and mandates. The UN often engages in too many projects that respond to financing opportunities or political interests. The resulting “projectitis” contributes little to systemic change in the name of sustainable development.
Projectitis also renders RC coordination futile. An RC does not have much of a chance to coordinate projects that primarily cater to the demands of external actors. Even larger UN field offices sometimes struggle to coordinate their project portfolio internally. One could even question if many projects where the UN is mainly a provider of support services really require coordination, because they are not pitched at the level of systemic change. A consistent criticism across UN meta-evaluations and reports from the Multilateral Performance Network (MOPAN) is that the conditions for working toward sustainable impact are not in place. The main challenges, succinctly listed in a UN evaluation from 2018, include the lack of exit strategies, short-term projects, offices that are spread too thin, lack of national ownership, and poor monitoring.
If coordination represents one default approach that has driven past reforms, then decentralization is another. In development circles, decentralization is an almost sacrosanct goal. It is seen as a crucial factor for national ownership, ensuring that development projects fit national needs and that money reaches recipients rather than staying at headquarters. Member states have therefore pressed UN entities for decades to move human resources and responsibilities to the country level. Yet decentralization comes with costs, at least in the context of the UN. It has resulted in a sprawling net of field offices (1,432 in 2016, according to a UN document from the previous reform), many of which manage only tiny budgets. It has also subjected the UN to the situational political interests of donors and host governments at the expense of more programmatically driven engagement at a higher political level. Perhaps the mistake is to think of the UN just as an aid implementer and not as a multilateral actor. Multilateralism requires a degree of centralization.
Reorienting the UN toward Greater Effectiveness
If member states see UN entities primarily as service providers—collectively owned by the UN’s membership but mostly programming and operating at the country level—then strengthening the UN’s project management capacities would be the right approach. In some settings, such as least developed and fragile countries, the UN will continue to have merit as a funder and project manager for the foreseeable future.
Yet the features of the UN as a multilateral organization with universal membership point to other functions as well. Imagine a UN that identifies noticeable progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—a successful clean energy transition in one country, noteworthy efforts to reduce inequality in another—then analyzes them, distills lessons, and provides policy advice grounded in the UN’s international norms and standards. Such an approach could help the UN’s development pillar stay relevant for middle-income countries. In the spirit of the 2030 Agenda’s transformative principle of universality, UN engagement could even be expanded toward high-income countries—a forgotten component of effective multilateralism.
To the extent that the UN maintains an operational field presence, its projects could be guided by best practices that combine its multilateral assets with a concern for effectiveness. This could involve providing policy advice based on international experience, convening stakeholders, operating in an integrated fashion, and focusing on projects that promote medium-term systemic change.
If the above diagnosis is correct, and if the UN80 reforms indeed aspire to a “massive overhaul,” then these reforms need to target individual entities and their way of operating. UN entities need to shift from a quasi-commercial way of operating that produces projectitis toward an effectiveness paradigm. Replacing the term “operational activities for development” with “sustainability cooperation” might be a good start. The RC system will more or less automatically come to life with a stronger foundation for how UN entities work.
How could this be done practically? Merging entities, as proposed by the secretary-general, would reduce the UN’s indefensible fragmentation, as well as the diplomatic workload, given that some boards would also disappear. Mergers would also present an opportunity to change costly and inefficient bureaucratic structures in ways unachievable by routine governance through executive boards. A member-state-led mandate review could serve to reflect on and rebalance UN entities’ mission statements and functions.
Human resource policies would need to change. The UN needs fewer project managers and more policy experts. A truly independent evaluation function, staffed by people from outside the UN, in the model of the UN’s Joint Inspection Unit, would go a long way in incentivizing a focus on achieving sustainable impact. On the more radical side, country-based resource mobilization, a major driver of projectitis, should be banned. UN field staff need to focus on supporting host countries with their undivided attention.
It might also be worthwhile for the UN to explore serving countries from regional or subregional offices to reduce the costs of multiple field offices. In the spirit of radical simplification, such a move could come with shifting from country-based programming toward regional and global programs, implementing well-tested solutions at scale. RC offices and a few UN entities could remain on the ground to act on behalf of others—for example, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) on the development side and the World Food Programme (WFP) on the humanitarian side.
Conclusion
As in any UN reform process, the political economy of reforms along these lines is daunting. In the past, many Global South countries have suspected Western countries of pushing reforms mainly to weasel their way out of their financial responsibilities. This time, however, reduced financial commitments are the starting point rather than the end point. For their part, many Global North countries have feared that reforms would cost them their privileged place in the global order. But this time, those global power shifts are already well underway. Both camps thus might have to accept that this time, more than ever before, the need for reform reflects real-world challenges, and sticking to the status quo will only reduce the benefits they receive from the UN. If last year’s Summit of the Future provided the UN with a software update, it now needs a political and institutional update.
Member states interested in safeguarding multilateralism should approach the UN80 reform process as an opportunity to build trust, seeking dialogue to pursue common interests. They should focus on the gains, not the inevitable losses to their privileges. Most importantly, perhaps, they should not lose sight of the basic value of the UN. In this new era of great power politics, the contours of which are only slowly emerging, member states have in the UN a time-tested, universal organization that elevates the voices of its weaker members, ensures a minimum of global solidarity, and helps with global problem solving.
Max-Otto Baumann is a senior researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
