UN reform has been a perennial topic almost since 1945, but the issue has taken on added urgency amid attacks on the UN Charter, a major funding crisis, and multiple global emergencies. Once again, the UN is consumed by reform deliberations, this time under the “UN80” rubric.

Discussing reform in the midst of crisis puts the UN in a difficult position. While it is being tested like never before to demonstrate its relevance in dealing with the multiple fires ablaze around the planet today, it must also direct significant energy to generating reform proposals—not a good time to be looking inwards too much. For their part, member states may not have the bandwidth and political capital needed to match their appetite for reform as their foreign ministries navigate these same crises. Combined with the high degree of geopolitical polarization and the imminent turnover at the top of the UN, this creates a challenging environment for UN reform, to say the least.

There is plenty to improve at the UN—on that there is consensus. The UN’s creaky 1940s architecture is woefully unsuited for 21st century challenges. The Security Council is the most glaring example of a structure profoundly out of step with contemporary realities and needs, but the UN development system is similarly outdated. The sprawling, 40-member UN Sustainable Development Group still largely reflects a 1950s view of the world, where most problems were thought best addressed through a sectoral lens, with UN agencies for health (WHO), agriculture (FAO), education (UNESCO), and so on.

These sectoral structures have delivered over the years. They have helped build ministries and develop public policies, eradicate diseases, boost agricultural productivity, and support electoral, constitution-drafting, and reconstruction processes. But the limits of these structures have become obvious when faced with a mounting list of issues that defy an orderly, sectoral view of the world—issues like water, climate change, HIV/AIDS, disaster risk reduction, and preventing violent extremism that demand a multidimensional response. This became especially obvious as governments sought to implement the integrated vision of the 2030 Agenda.

While national governments wrestle with the same challenge of keeping their bureaucratic structures up to date, they typically have more options for responding than the UN does. A prime minister can create a new office or ministry or cross-ministerial mechanism typically lead by a powerful part of the bureaucracy—the prime minister’s office or ministry of finance, for example—to mediate competing sectoral interests and force a joined-up approach.

Faced with the same challenge of modernizing its structures, the UN development system is much more constrained. The task of creating new UN entities frightens off all but the most zealous—though the creation of new entities like UN Women in 2010 or the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in 1999 are reminders that it is possible. And while new interagency mechanisms abound at the UN, the UN has no equivalent of a powerful prime minister at whose “pleasure” ministers serve; rather, most UN development entities answer to their own boards and control their own budgets. Arbitrating competing interests in such a federation is more about carrots than sticks. “Herding cats” is a popular expression in UN coordination circles for good reason.

Lessons from the 2018 Development System Reforms

While still incomplete, the reforms introduced over the last decade to allow the UN development system to overcome these architectural constraints offer some lessons on how to rewire a major sector of the UN without attempting open-heart surgery. On taking office in 2017, Secretary-General António Guterres recognized the urgent need to modernize UN development structures but did not wait for a moment of planetary alignment to reconfigure the UN system across the board. Rather, he sought to force the system to work together more effectively via a mix of bold reform measures targeting leadership, incentives, obstacles, and enablers.

Key to his solution was consolidating more authority at the country level—many miles away from governing bodies and headquarters politics—in an empowered resident coordinator (RC). The job of the RC would be to pull the right configuration of UN actors together to respond to the growing list of intersectoral priorities. He envisioned the RC as a new breed of UN leader—a leader who could mediate, speak on behalf of the whole system, and build and champion a common strategy. They would remain above the fray of individual agency fundraising and have access to financial, moral, political, and functional levers with which to convince recalcitrant agencies to “opt in” to greater integration of efforts and even brands.

Incentives to encourage these new behaviors included new financing mechanisms for joint endeavors (such as the SDG Fund), the opening up of the RC role to candidates from a cross-section of agencies, and efforts to give specialized agencies with limited field presence more access to country-level operations. Obstacles that hindered integration of agency efforts were similarly targeted via measures such as new joint programming tools and a historic “mutual recognition” statement signed by most agencies allowing signatories to piggyback on each other’s administrative processes. Upgraded and more rigorous analytical and planning instruments, coupled with investments in data and systemwide reporting, raised the chances that all UN entities would be contributing to both their own priorities and collective analyses and solutions.

The UN General Assembly formally endorsed Guterres’s vision in May 2018. Since then, the UN development system has undergone a transformation, with a new cadre of 131 RCs deployed around the world reporting directly to the secretary-general. They are supported in their work by small offices with capacity in planning, economics, and communications—everywhere, not just in the donor darlings, in countries both big and small—and a new Development Coordination Office in New York and in the regions. In surveys conducted in 2024, 87% of host governments reported that UN system entities were working more collaboratively than ever, and 84% of donor governments credited RCs with improving the UN’s coherence and reducing duplication. Agencies reported some $600 million in cumulative efficiency gains due to a mix of agency-specific and interagency measures since the reforms were launched, thanks at least in part to greater pooling of assets.

I was part of the early team that engineered this ambitious transformation and have watched its progress in the years since. Today’s RCs are indeed a “new breed”—around 80% are new to the role since the 2018 reforms were launched, and they have a much wider range of UN (and non-UN) profiles. Like their government and donor counterparts, I have seen how UN country teams are working together better and better, deferring to their RC reflexively where once they did so under sufferance. The confidential, annual feedback provided by over 1,600 agency heads working in UN country teams speaks volumes to the increasing confidence they have in their RCs. Last year, nine out of ten of these senior operational leaders rated their RC 6 out of 7 for their integrity, humility, courage, systems thinking, and trust-building.

That being said, not everyone is a fan of the repositioned UN development system with its empowered RCs, mission to shift resources toward policy and expert advice via UN country teams with a smaller footprint, and emphasis on joined-up planning and financing systems. Each of these goals rubs against years of established practice, and past experience shows that it will take time for the institutional dust to settle; few remember now the rocky first decade of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Reform via systems rather than structures takes time and doesn’t deliver the early bang that mergers and acquisitions do. For this reason, too, any new secretary-general with such ambitions needs to “start early and start hard” if they are going to shift those underlying systems before their time runs out.

UN Reform as a Joint Venture

It also needs to be said that some key components of the 2018 reform vision have not landed successfully. The UN’s large regional economic commissions, for example, continue to operate largely on a separate axis from UN country operations and have struggled to find their role in a repositioned UN development system. It has proven hard to transition the UN’s development support to focus more on policy and convening and less on project management (i.e., building and delivering “things”). No progress has been made on getting donors to reduce their tight earmarking of most funding. And disconnects between humanitarian and development financing still haunt us after decades of debate and incremental measures. The UN80 reform package has most of these issues in its sights, explicitly or implicitly, but each will need to be approached with humility and creativity after years of frustrated progress.

These reforms will also remain ‘’unfinished business” unless member states remain committed to finishing the job started in 2018, even as they contemplate a new round of reforms. Toward this end, member states should:

• Stand firmly behind the 2018 reforms and not give oxygen to those who may seek to relitigate them. This requires remaining committed to the leadership role of RCs and the universality of their presence, regardless of donor funding priorities, and continuing to support the critical role of the deputy secretary-general at the helm of the UN development system.
• Decide, finally, what role they want the UN’s regional economic commissions to play. There remain major differences between member states on this question, making it impossible to unlock the potential of these structures. The UN Secretariat cannot decide this for them. As the UN wrestles with the proposed “regional reset” under UN80, no amount of new structures and mechanisms on the part of the Secretariat will substitute for clarity and consensus from member states.
• Reconfirm the $53 million provided from the regular budget of the UN for the RC system since last year. The actual budget of the new RC system has never reached the full $255 million in operating costs required, and funding uncertainty has plagued the new setup from day one as it remained heavily dependent on voluntary contributions. The $53 million from the regular budget represents only 20% of the operating costs of the RC system but is a critical financial stabilizer. It should be considered very good value for money as an enabler of UN system coherence without major architectural changes at the global level.
• Start reducing their addiction to tight earmarking of contributions to the UN development system. A practical step in the right direction would be for more donors (beyond the current three: the EU, Sweden, and Iceland) to pay the 1% levy on earmarked project funding directly from their own accounts and not ask agencies to include it in project budgets. Only then might this 2019 innovation start incentivizing a move toward less earmarked funding channels where the levy does not apply. Not incidentally, this might also reduce some agencies’ resentment over their burden of funding the costs of the RC system.

None of the measures listed above requires returning to parliaments or congresses to seek new funding for the UN development system. Rather, they require political will, institutional discipline, and coordination within and between member states. Time and time again, the 2018 reforms have revealed that how member states fund the UN development system is almost as important as how much they fund it.

It’s unclear if the conditions are currently in place for the major structural update the UN needs. Timing is everything—as the UN’s founders understood—and one has to wonder whether today’s political polarization, bandwidth constraints, and scarce political capital create some risk to embarking on open-heart surgery without a shared strategic vision of the endpoint. Arguments on how to get there are healthy, but if there is too big a gap between member states on what “there” actually is, the UN risks being condemned to years of protracted debate, introspection, and uncertainty.

Yet this message is not one of despair. If circumstances force us to wait longer still for that Charter review promised in Article 109—now at least 75 years delayed—it may still be possible to engineer ambitious reforms through a combination of bold measures around leadership, incentives, and systems. It’s arguably not as good, nor as efficient, as a major structural reset, but it might allow the UN a greater chance of meeting the demands of the day while we wait for better times to overhaul our elderly, outdated superstructure.

To learn more, read the full-length report this article draws-from.