Can the UN really reform itself?

In March, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres unveiled his UN80 Initiative, a set of cost-cutting reforms aimed at making the world body more efficient — and able to thrive with a lot less funding. The hasty reform effort, which involves deep staff cuts and the consolidation of agencies and departments, was triggered by draconian cuts in U.S. funding to the United Nations. It has engendered deep skepticism among U.N. staffers and experts, who claim it lacks a blueprint for making the U.N. more relevant. There are also doubts about whether the outgoing U.N. leader, or the U.N.’s 193 often quarrelsome member states, have the vision, the political will, or capital required to remake the United Nations and its myriad funds and specialized agencies for the 21st century. “I have no doubt there’s a lot of efficiencies to be had, and people should be brave and try to tackle it,” Elizabeth Campbell, the executive director of ODI Global Washington, said during a recent Devex Pro Briefing alongside Richard Gowan, the chief of U.N. advocacy at the International Crisis Group. “I am highly skeptical that the U.N. itself can effectively pursue that kind of reform. I don’t really see it able to do it,” she said. Campbell is a former senior U.N. official and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the U.S. State Department during former President Joe Biden’s administration. She noted that the “reform is very, very difficult, extremely incremental and resistant at every turn. So this idea that somehow the U.N. itself would be able to effectively put forward a restructuring that would include collapsing a number of those [U.N.] organizations … I find that hard to believe.” Campbell said that the only path to imposing the kinds of changes needed to modernize the U.N. would require leadership by a group of highly influential countries “who are committed to it and drive that change and build some kind of political momentum.” Such a coalition has yet to emerge. Guterres’ initiative entails three basic components: 1) Actions the U.N. chief can take on his own to save costs and improve efficiencies, such as imposing a hiring freeze, reducing operating costs, or turning down the air conditioning in U.N. headquarters during the summer. 2) Reviewing the thousands of mandates assigned to it by governments over the past several decades. 3) Imposing wider structural reforms. The second and third components require member state approval. In recent weeks, Guterres has released a revised 2026 budget — which cuts $500 million from its regular budget and eliminates nearly 2,700 posts — and a plan for the structural reform, including the merging of several U.N. agencies’ departments. It would fold UNOPS into the U.N. Development Programme and U.N. Population Fund into UN Women. UNAIDS would be phased out by the end of 2026, with its residual expertise being absorbed into other U.N. development agencies. Gowan argued that Guterres’ consolidation project has been hindered by internal bureaucratic resistance, a lack of clarity in U.S. plans for the U.N., and the dwindling time left for him to make changes as he enters his final year as head of the world body. “The U.N. system has been attempting to find a reform package that will satisfy the Americans without having any clear sense of what the U.S. red lines are,” he said. Also, “I don’t think that Guterres has been very happy with the ambition of the proposals he’s getting from around the system. Most parts of the system are being very protective, very conservative, and are not suggesting big institutional change, and that is apparently causing a lot of annoyance.” As for the member states, they appear to be playing a waiting game, according to Gowan. “When you talk to diplomats, most of them will say: ‘Yeah, we support UN80. This needs to happen just to keep the ship afloat, but we’re going to wait for the next person, whoever she is, or whoever he is, and we’re going to see if we can find a new secretary-general who will have the time and the political capital to really drive a much bigger strategic review of where the U.N. is going.’”