Today’s global challenges—including climate shocks, geopolitical conflicts, mass displacement, and the rapid spread of disruptive technologies—are more interconnected than at any point in the UN’s history. Addressing them demands a United Nations that works as a single, coherent system. The secretary-general’s new report on UN reform, “Shifting Paradigms: United to Deliver,” is the latest, most ambitious attempt to make the UN fit for that task. However, while the report’s diagnosis of the UN’s fragmentation is candid, its proposed solutions fall short of addressing the deep-seated structural and behavioral issues that have stymied reform for decades.

The UN80 Vision: What the Report Proposes

The “Shifting Paradigms” report was released on September 18, 2025, as the centerpiece of the UN80 initiative’s “Workstream 3” on structural change. It will now be up to member states to decide whether to take these proposals forward.

The “Shifting Paradigms” report argues that incremental adjustments are no longer sufficient and calls for a fundamental transformation in how the UN operates. Its proposals are organized around three key shifts:

1. New Paradigms in Each Pillar: The report advocates for significant reorganization within the UN’s core pillars. For peace and security, this includes consolidating the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Peace Operations (DPO). For development and humanitarian action, it proposes streamlined delivery mechanisms and better-coordinated planning.
2. Cross-Pillar Collaboration: Dubbed a “Better Together” approach, the report emphasizes breaking down silos between pillars at the global, regional, and country levels to foster more holistic responses.
3. Enabling Impact: The report identifies critical cross-cutting enablers—such as shared data platforms, common back-office services, and more flexible funding models—to drive a culture of continuous improvement.

Yet this compelling vision is built on a fundamental paradox. The report describes a system so complex and disjointed that it lacks a coherent foundation from which to shift. A paradigm can only shift when there is a clear, existing paradigm to move away from; a collection of fragmented parts has no coherent center to transform.

The Retreat from Integration

The report’s central flaw, however, is not in its ambition, but in its memory. It fails to confront the UN’s strategic retreat from the hard but necessary doctrine of integration. For years, “integration” was the UN’s most serious attempt to mandate coherence in complex crises, providing a clear normative framework and operational tools. The 2021 UN Integration Review, which I was commissioned to lead, confirmed that while field operations value connection, they are consistently hindered by a lack of strategic purpose from headquarters. Yet over the past decade, the term “integration” has been replaced by softer notions like “cross-pillar collaboration,” leaving a vacuum of authority and accountability that “Shifting Paradigms” does not fill.

The results of this ambiguity are visible on the ground. In Haiti, the abrupt suspension of critical humanitarian services left 5.5 million people in need—a clear sign of coordination failure. In the Sahel, a decade of international interventions has been described as a “collective failure,” as siloed UN responses struggled to link political strategy with development and humanitarian action.

Although the report champions cross-pillar collaboration, its proposed solutions remain largely organized around the UN’s traditional silos: peace and security, humanitarian action, development, and human rights. This structure risks replicating old problems under new labels. Instead of building on the hard-won, field-level understanding of the indivisible humanitarian-development-peace nexus, the report’s framework reinforces the very conceptual boundaries the UN claims it wants to overcome. This leaves staff and agencies  trapped in the turf battles that have long plagued the system rather than incentivizing the collaboration and collective commitment required to tackle complex crises.

Why the Reforms Fall Short

This is not a failure of analysis but of architecture. By insisting that reforms stay “within existing rules and procedures,” the report virtually guarantees that the structures protecting mandates—and blocking change—remain intact. It offers no hard levers to enforce its vision. For example, it calls for more flexible funding but proposes no mechanism to counter donors’ continued reliance on earmarked contributions, which—as the secretary‑general noted in remarks on August 1^st—accounted for 85% of all voluntary UN system funding in 2023 and remain a key obstacle to coherence and impact. It advocates for shared data but fails to confront the deep-seated institutional resistance to data transparency.

Leadership remains another blind spot. A paradigm shift requires “trilingual” leaders who can bridge peace, development, and humanitarian action. Yet the UN’s promotion system continues to reward siloed headquarters experience over the diverse, operational field experience needed to manage integrated programs. The report is silent on how to cultivate this next generation of system leaders.

A Proven Path Forward

Transformation is possible, but it requires institutional courage. South Africa’s post-apartheid higher-education reforms provide a powerful model. The government forced racially segregated universities to integrate by mandating three mechanisms:

1. External audits with consequences to ensure accountability for reform;
2. Budget conditionality that tied funding directly to integration milestones; and
3. Mandated integration of core functions to unify planning and resource allocation.

The UN could adopt similar tools to enforce its own reform agenda: independent coherence audits linked to leadership performance, budget allocations tied to measurable integration benchmarks, and a clear mandate to unify core functions where appropriate.

From Review to Restructuring

The UN80 initiative has produced a clear diagnostic in its Mandate Implementation Review and an ambitious vision in the “Shifting Paradigms” report. But vision is not enough. Without the structural levers and behavioral incentives that make collaboration nonnegotiable, the UN will continue reshuffling programs rather than truly reforming them.

The UN’s 80th anniversary demands an honest reckoning. As Boutros Boutros‑Ghali warned in 1995, coordination across the UN system had “to date proved difficult to achieve” because “each of the agencies concerned has its own intergovernmental legislative body and its own mandate.” He noted that “multifunctional peace-keeping operations and peace-building transcend the competence and expertise of any one department, programme, fund, office or agency.” Without a genuinely integrated approach—both at headquarters and in the field—the UN would struggle to consolidate peace or deliver results.

That warning remains largely unheeded. The 2021 UN Integration Review confirmed that fragmented approaches still undermine the system’s effectiveness—especially in complex, multidimensional settings. While recent reforms have helped clarify the problem, they have not yet equipped the system to resolve it.

Responsibility now shifts to member states. With all three UN80 reports released, it is up to governments to align mandates, financing, and oversight with the integrated vision they claim to support. Reform cannot be left to the Secretariat alone. That means member states must stop outsourcing blame and start exercising ownership.

The people the UN serves deserve more than declarations of intent. They deserve a system that works: united in purpose, coherent in structure, and accountable in results.

Jordan Ryan is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and former Vice President for Peace Programs at The Carter Center. He served as UN resident coordinator in Vietnam, deputy special representative of the secretary-general in Liberia, and director of UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery. In 2021, he led the UN Integration Review commissioned by the Executive Office of the Secretary-General.