By Stephanie Hodge*
NEW YORK | 2 December 2025 (IDN) — If I were the Secretary-General, I would stop pretending that the UN is a delicate Swiss clock that needs a light polishing. It’s not a clock. It’s an old mansion with leaky pipes, faulty wiring, and a family upstairs arguing about who forgot to pay the utility bills.
So here is what I would do.
First, I’d walk into the Fifth Committee, look every Ambassador straight in the eye, and say:
“Pay. Your Bills.”
No metaphors. No sorrowful appeals to multilateral ideals. Just the truth: you cannot run a global institution on $1.586 billion in arrears. If a country is months late, fine. If they’re years late? Voting rights freeze until they pay the tab.
The UN is the only organisation in the world where people demand premium service while deliberately starving the system.
Second, I would impose a moratorium on mandates. No new resolutions until the existing ones are funded.
If Member States want peacekeeping, oceans, climate, cyber, GBF, LDN, AI governance, human rights, gender equality, youth employment, or any other noble demand — wonderful. Put the money on the table first. Otherwise, it goes onto the “Unfunded Wishes Registry,” right next to unicorn conservation.
Third, I’d tear down the 40 administrative kingdoms.
Payroll is scattered across continents.
Procurement rules that read like 12th-century monastic doctrine.
HR systems that contradict each other before breakfast.
I’d consolidate all of it — one global backbone, three geographic hubs, and service-level agreements that would make a private-sector COO weep with relief.
Fourth, I’d protect the technical experts like they were the world’s last known supply of antibiotics.
Chemical specialists, human rights lawyers, disaster risk scientists, economists, translators, analysts — these people are the actual engine of the UN. Not the glossy strategy manuals. Not the reform branding exercises.
If anyone gets cut, it’s the duplicative admin layers that breed memos like rabbits.
Fifth, I would digitise the UN so aggressively that people would think I was staging a coup against Microsoft Excel.
Institutional memory should not live in personal inboxes.
Reporting shouldn’t require archaeological excavation.
Data should flow like electricity, not be smuggled in PDFs from office to office.
Sixth, I’d bring every Agency, Fund, and Programme into one room — the whole UN family, all the cousins — and I’d say:
“The era of pretending we’re separate is over. We sink or swim together. Pick one.”
And then I would harmonise systems, standards, and back-office functions across the whole alphabet soup. Not by force — by logic. Agencies would realise very quickly that independence does not mean 17 duplicate procurement regimes.
Seventh, I would rebuild trust, the only way trust is ever rebuilt:
By showing receipts.
Quarterly public reports on money in, money out, and mandate delivery.
No more fog. No more “we’ll get back to you.”
Real transparency, not the decorative kind.
And finally, I would stand in front of the General Assembly and say the thing every SG is too polite to say:
“You cannot demand a 21st-century UN while funding it like it’s 1945.
Either invest in the system you claim to believe in, or admit you don’t. But stop pretending both are possible.”
That is what I would do.
Not because it’s radical — it isn’t.
It’s just rice and beans: the basic nutrients needed to keep the UN alive and honest.
Everything else — the speeches, the branding, the glossy reform brochures — is garnish.
*Stephanie Hodge, MPA Harvard (2006), is an international evaluator and former UN advisor who has worked across 140 countries. She is a former staff member of UNDP (1994-1996 & 1999-2004) and UNICEF (2008-2014). She writes on governance, multilateral reform, and climate equity. (IDN-InDepthNews)
Image credit: United Nations