By Simone Galimberti*
KATHMANDU, Nepal | 3 August 2025, (IDN) — For several months, the United Nations has been in turmoil. The whole UN System, with myriad agencies and programs, is questioning itself.
Staff in country offices are holding town-hall meetings because their jobs are in jeopardy.
The UN Secretary General and his senior staff are all focused on a transition process that should lead to a more agile, mission-focused, and impact-oriented organisation. In theory, this complex process is a good thing, even if, after years of mostly failed attempts, the new American administration now forces these changes and a very volatile geopolitical landscape that is pushing major donor nations to turn away from international development.
Yet there is a high risk that, once again, such moves won’t result in meaningful and desired changes. It is common knowledge that the UN System is huge and in a certain way, out of control.
The system has become a gigantic red tape, hard to navigate and an absolute nightmare, especially in terms of the value of money and overall level of accountability and transparency.
There are too many organisations, mostly working in silos, despite some efforts in recent years to strengthen the coordination role of the UN Resident Coordinators at the country level.
The organisational culture prevailing at the UN also reflects the dynamics of a complex and bureaucratic system, with staff, while well-meaning and devoted to the cause, have become too detached from the ground reality, as if they were in a crystal ball.
It is not that there have not been genuine and sincere attempts to bring in some improvements.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has been trying to spearhead some necessary restructurings both at the organisational and operational levels.
Since taking over in 2017, Mr. Guterres has started the so-called United to Reform Process, hoping to deliver a more functional and impactful UN.
At the programmatic level, through Our Common Agenda, the Secretary General had proposed a very bold, visionary set of initiatives that could have been instrumental in refocusing the mission and goals of the UN.
Both initiatives saw only a minimal level of implementation due to pushbacks from the member states and also internal complexities involving bringing reforms to the UN.
The latest incarnation of these waves of reorganisations is named UN80 Initiative and is led by Under-Secretary-General for Policy, Guy Ryder, who is leading a high-level task force.
It is clear that while the previous attempts of change were a direct outcome of Mr. Guterres’s willingness to challenge the status quo, now the process is driven by external circumstances that are forcing the UN to break with the past finally.
The task is enormous, but in the end, as specified by Mr. Ryder, it will be up to the member nations of the UN to make the final call, deciding which agencies and programs will survive as standing-alone entities and which others will merge or simply shut down.
But is this the best and only way to proceed? Should national governments that are themselves responsible for what the UN has become be the only arbiters and decision makers on its future?
Why not enable the citizens of the nations that make up the UN to have a voice and say?
Over the past years, there have been several initiatives of transnational peoples’ assemblies or global citizens’ assemblies that were created to bring more legitimacy and democratic ethos to the discussions related to some of the most daunting issues faced by humanity.
One of these is the Global Citizens’ Assembly for COP26, which was constituted by a Core Assembly with 100 members representing different geographical areas and a more decentralised network of community assemblies scattered across the world.
In this second localised effort, at least 1300 participants took part, providing inputs and ideas aimed at influencing the global proceedings in Glasgow, where the COP 26 was held. Despite being a symbolic initiative, the intent of this Global Assembly was potent and transformational in its overarching ambition.
A new policy brief, Global Citizens’ Assemblies, Pathways for the UN: Principles, design and implementation, proposes ways to institutionalise global citizens’ assemblies at the UN.
The proposal, introduced by Democracy International and Democracy without Borders in May this year, would leverageArt.22 of the UN Charter as a way to democratise the tackling of the most pressing issues debated at the UN.
As daunting as it might look, it is imperative to start a difficult conversation within the General Assembly of the UN over a major rethinking of multilateralism by boosting a dose of citizens’ deliberations within it.
The level of ambition of such a type of proposals (there have been others of similar nature as well) is so revolutionary that it will be impossible, at least in the short and medium terms, to garner the consensus of the majority of the member states to back them.
The urgency of the ongoing process of revisiting the ways the UN works cannot be tied to what, in the view of many member states, would be considered radical, even if much-needed, propositions.
We should ask ourselves what is under the control of Mr. Guterres and Mr. Ryder. Considering the tight timing of the UN80 Initiative, they could indeed take the lead to initiate, with the backing of some of the most progressive member states of the UN (for example, Canada, the EU, the Scandinavian nations), a global online initiative with the public from around the world.
Borrowing from the experiences in running global citizens’ assemblies, especially the academic work done by the Global Citizens’ Assembly Network (GloCAN), this undertaking would embed the significant (but realistically speaking, not all) aspects of global deliberation practices so far matured.
On the model of the experiences developed for the global consultation for the COP 26, localised forms of deliberations and consultation could be held at country levels by a hybrid combination of in-person and online meetings.
UNDP and UNV could be well equipped to run such ground-level exercises of citizens’ participation.
If the timing won’t allow such a comprehensive initiative, at a minimum, the Offices of UN Resident Coordinators could organise some town-hall meetings with the youths cost-effectively.
This means not doing it as per the business-as-usual approach, with the traditional five-star hotels, as it usually occurs with the UN, but rather doing it in-house or in venues provided by the hosting governments for free.
Such details might be trivial, but, in the end, they do matter because, over the years, such practices have dented the reputation and respectability of the UN.
In the bottom line, the ongoing rethinking of the UN should not be just tightly controlled by the
UN apparatus and by the national governments.
While the layers are set for much more ambitious reforms of the UN based on deliberations, the current crisis can be used to initiate some forms of public participation, albeit imperfectly.
Not checking all boxes in terms of the thresholds that the best deliberative practices imply should not be seen as a red line.
What counts is for the UN to become conscious that any changes at the UN should also be bottom-up.
Such a start, even if partially flawed, would be symbolically important because it can set the ground for more ambitious forms of deliberations that one day might materialise at the UN.
These would not only revamp but also transform the core of multilateralism, one of the best assets at the disposal of humanity, which is now so endangered that it is at risk of disappearing.
*Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centred policy-making and a stronger and better United Nations. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: The Security Council Chamber as seen on 16 November 2023. CC BY 4.
