Opinion: At the UN, we need to do better with less. Here’s how

The United Nations, an 80-year-old organization and a cornerstone of the multilateral syste, is having to respond to a swell of new demands for budget cuts and efficiencies. The U.N. could be undermined in the process if we don’t proceed with care. This is especially true of the U.N.’s development work. There is one theme around which recent global sustainable development conversations have coalesced: The need to do better with less. Better outcomes. Better equity. Better governance. But, with less funding, less time, less leadership, and less trust. We are all being asked to navigate a complex and unstable global landscape, and at the U.N., also seize a rare opportunity for ‘architectural change’. This is no easy task. Doing better with less: An idea whose time has come (again) Doing better with less isn’t a new idea. The 2008 global financial crisis ushered in an era of austerity in which leaders radically scaled back spending at home and abroad, including at the U.N., seeking to balance development impact with thriftiness. At the second edition of the Hamburg Sustainability Conference and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development Preparatory Committees earlier this month, aid cuts loomed large, alongside trade wars and political fragmentation. These are familiar challenges for the U.N., which has long struggled to align its resources with the scale of global need. U.N. Secretary-General Antonió Guterres has responded with an ambitious reform agenda: UN80, intended to reposition the organization for these uncertain times. The scale and scope of UN80 reform will be driven less by the organization’s leadership than by the collective ambition of its member states — which is why the German government’s announcement at HSC of an alliance to support the U.N. Development System is so important. Close to 20 countries have already aligned behind a set of five principles to guide UN80 reform efforts — giving us a glimpse into what doing better with less may actually mean. It is not only about improving the efficiency of resources contributed (money, technical assistance); it is also about the values you defend. We argue that by acting with a renewed sense of purpose, pace, priority, and precision, the UN80 reforms can advance shared development goals. Purpose Purpose means bringing a sensitive and sensible approach to development cooperation that accounts for new political realities and serves mutual economic and security interests while still supporting the most vulnerable. Given planetary pressures, the approach should be guided by long-term interests and what matters to the many versus the few. The bolder vision for future generations presented at HSC was an important step in this direction. We must also explain how — and why — we cooperate more clearly and persuasively. The Second Global Cooperation Barometer, published by the World Economic Forum in January, argues that global cooperation has flatlined over the past three years. We can no longer take for granted a widespread, shared understanding of the necessity of international cooperation among electorates or their appreciation for the mutual insurance that cooperation provides in times of crises. We need to reframe the mutuality narrative around development to underscore its importance to national, regional, and global growth, sustainability, and security. Pace The sense of urgency in Hamburg was palpable, as leaders grappled with a cascading set of global challenges that are pushing us near global tipping points. Systemic shocks carry dire consequences for humanity. They are now a regular feature of our shared experience with impacts that are likely impossible to reverse. We need to take timely collective action; avoid “analysis paralysis” and “fail fast.” Our approach should seize quick wins and drive incremental progress while maintaining big ambition and moving nimbly to improve lives. We know how to do this. Look no further than the U.N.’s drive to extend lifesaving early warning systems to countries without safeguards against hazardous weather, water, and climate events. This multipronged, people-centered, mission-oriented initiative encourages national ownership and multilateral partnership to identify and take rapid actions to minimize risks. It’s a template for other global development challenges. Priority There is no escaping the hard reality that more limited resources mean we must prioritize investments. Critical to this effort is furthering research, evidence-building, and solution-mapping to expose cooperation and interventions that work, and therefore warrant additional scarce inputs. We must do a better job of identifying areas of ingenuity within the multilateral system — structures and mechanisms that enable and unlock cooperation and global public investment on mutually acceptable terms. We must also prioritize the systematic removal of the barriers and constraints that undermine local and regional ambitions for self-sufficiency and resilience. Removing barriers can improve gender equity, allow greater participation in standard-setting, expand the labor force, and increase prosperity and peace. Leaders can also deploy both policy and nonmonetary levers of development, enabling them to do better with less. Preferential trade, for example, can smooth supply chains, create markets, empower SMEs, and promote the private sector. Precision Doing better with less means strategic utilization of available resources. At the institutional level, it calls for streamlining processes and clarifying accountabilities. As development financing increasingly leans on and needs to leverage the private sector and philanthropy, smart partnering is even more critical – with creative coalitions, new incentives, aligned objectives, and use of innovative transactional instruments and delivery platforms. Precision can be achieved through investments in cooperative initiatives that facilitate multilaterals working together, such as in the climate-security nexus, and through novel structures such as Peace and Development Advisors and country platforms. For all stakeholders, doing better with less should mean guiding resources to augment impact: ensuring decisions are informed with quality data and applying technology for reach and scale. Initiatives such as the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data work to unlock data’s potential as a force multiplier for development. The UN80 springboard Few of the participants at the inaugural Hamburg Sustainability Conference in October 2024 foresaw the world we are navigating today — the disintegration of large parts of the global aid architecture, the weaponization of global trade, and the unprecedented unraveling of global norms. Yet it is precisely this context that makes the 2025 HSC gathering so remarkable. Rather than using the platform to criticize or condemn, it has served as a call to action — inviting allies of multilateralism and champions of international cooperation to deepen their investment, reaffirm their commitments, and articulate a concrete vision for positioning the United Nations as an enabler of equitable development. The stakes couldn’t be higher for FfD4 at the end of this month to demonstrate that these sentiments can carry through in an intergovernmental process. The U.N. must inevitably evolve, and its 80th anniversary offers a timely opportunity to do so. But this evolution need not come at the expense of its core values, nor should it overlook the many ways the multilateral system has successfully unlocked cooperation on some of the world’s most intractable challenges over the past eight decades.