By Simone Galimberti*
KATHMANDU, Nepal | 22 September 2025 (IDN) — The United Nations must change. This is imperative, if the institution created to promote universal rights, peace and development, wants to remain relevant. The ongoing global landscape with developed nations retrenching from their international development commitments is finally forcing the UN to do it.
As a consequence, the UN80, an initiative aimed at celebrating an important milestone in the history of the United Nations, its 80th foundational anniversary, has been turned into a process to reform and change the way this institution works.
Reforming the UN is certainly a daunting process.
The UN80 process itself is complex with three major “workstreams” or key goals that are guiding the review and seven thematic clusters led by senior UN officials that are working on tangible proposals.
It is a mammoth exercise and based on a memo that were leaked, there are some bold ideas that are being considered, including drastic mergers and closing of some programs and entities.
If implemented, these major reforms would be a welcomed development but, at the same time, it is essential that any major change at the UN should be guided by a simple question: in which areas and sectors can the UN bring its best?
In other words, where can the UN really make a difference?
If we look at the UN Charter, there are three pillars: peace & security, human rights and development. Among the three, the UN has, at the best, a mixed record in terms of performance and work achieved, in some instances, there have been abject failures.
Through this article, I want to make a case on where the UN should bet its future and it is not where it has been the most visible and active, the development sector.
This is where the vast majority of the UN budget is spent and this is where a galaxy of agencies and programs have popped up with often significantly overlapping mandates.
Retrenching from “doing ” development
Among the three, this is the area where the UN should have the best track record and the highest level of expertise.
There is no doubt that within the UN there is a unique know-how on matters related to development and yet, at the end of the day, the implementation of its work leaves a lot to be desired.
Rather than focusing on “doing’ development, whatever agencies and programs that will re-emerge from the UN80 restructuring, the UN should step back. Instead, it should re-focus on effective re-granting, research & analysis and watchdog functions.
It is true that, on paper, many UN agencies are not implementers but rather they work in partnership with host governments. This is, after all, the most important mandate of the UN is to work with national governments.
Yet, too often, at country levels, UN agencies and programs end up with running “project implementing units” that are in charge of specific initiatives funded by other bilateral and multilateral donors.
Such programs are often grandiose with very ambitious targets and very generous budget but their results are modest. The UN agencies and programs of the future should stop entertaining such endeavors.
While it is paramount to build the technical expertise of national governments in the Global South, are we sure that the UN is truly fit to build the institutional capacity of their host nations?
We do often hear about the “dependency” effect that the development industry enables. I do believe that the UN is greatly responsible for enabling such reliance without enabling its counterparts, the governments of least developing nations and other developing countries, to truly step up the game on their own.
The reason is that, at the end of the day, there are too many external factors that determine the internal dynamics of how, for example, a ministry or public agency, for example, works and performs.
Many of them, including the degree of accountability and integrity of key officers, are totally out of control of any development assistance program. So, technical assistance is an area where the UN should fully retrench and its whole development assistance should be scaled back and re-set though it should not be totally abandoned.
Only in rare circumstances, think of Haiti, when the state collapses, then there would be a justification for the UN to be directly involved in capacity building and organizational development. In these extreme scenarios, the UN should run the whole government.
Let’s talk about how the new development capabilities the UN could look like.
For example, the re-granting role.
If bilateral or multilateral development agencies stop financing UN country offices to implement projects that ultimately are supposed to be carried out by governments, the UN could free itself of huge “baggage” that burdens it even if it is not admitting it.
Instead, UN entities could receive financial support from development partners and then re-granting it to governments and civil society organizations.
This means that governments’ agencies and offices, like their civil society counterparts, should put a serious effort when they want to apply for a grant. Till now, it has never been the case.
If the activities that are to be funded are really a serious priority, then it should not be a problem for government officials to roll up their sleeves. That’s what civil society based organizations have been doing and as we know, they are now starving for funding.
If national governments really want to manage development aid (and this is not wrong), then they should compete because not always development aid can be efficiently delivered by government agencies.
A UN that does not implement any more development assistance but only works as a lean intermediary, will imply a drastic reduction of manpower. This would be a good thing if it happens because it would drastically cut the costs and make the whole organization much quicker and faster.
There should still be space for know-how facilitation within the UN but it should work more as a knowledge creator rather than a “nanny” that takes care of projects managed by governments with often engrossed and inflated budgets.
In practice, the UN at country levels should provide independent and impartial research and opinions, providing inputs to the development priorities set by the host governments.
It should be totally acceptable and welcome if the UN ends up offering divergent views from what the governments want to do. At the end of the day, the UN was not created to second and endorse whatever ideas the Governments come up with.
As the UN would drastically change its development practice and shifts to a more nimble role, it could embrace the role of “watchdog”, including providing unbiased reviews and analyses of the “outputs” achieved by governments with money received from the UN and other agencies.
Imagine what I would call “Accountability Boards” that carry out independent evaluations of development work. Right now, the UN country offices look more like sycophants always praising their host countries even if their governments are massively corrupted on ineptly incompetent.
This approach does not make sense and does not serve the cause of ending poverty and creating development opportunities for the poor.
If a host country does not agree to the new “rules”, then it means that it does not really need the resources and expertise that the UN could provide.
Towards a UNRC 3.0
While it is going to be impossible to merge all the agencies and programs in one entity at the central level, the UN country offices should be drastically overhauled in such a way they can really work as “One UN Program” under the purview of the UN Resident Coordinators.
This means that national level directors or representatives of single agencies or program could become redundant. Whatever entities will remain in place at the end of the UN80 reform, they could always deputize some international staff in local “One UN Offices” but they should effectively report to their respective UN Resident Coordinators.
The Resident Coordinators, in a major reform that would build on the development happened in 2019, should have even a bigger role. I would call this the UNRC Reform 3.0.
In this new phase, Resident Coordinators should be in charge of accountability towards the head offices. This means that they should report within a new revamped and much more unified and interlinked reporting system run by different head agencies and programs but highly coordinated by a new centralized mechanism, the “UN Development Entity” to whom all the programs and agencies would report to.
In practice, UNRC 3.0 means Resident Coordinators acting as CEOs to one “headquarter” with different divisions, each of these corresponding to the agencies and programs that will emerge from the UN80 reform.
Coming to the second and third areas, human rights and security respectively, I do believe that the UN should have a much more ambitious role.
Focus on Human Rights, Peace & Security
A more agile and less bureaucratic development dimension that is more hands-off could enable the UN to have a much bigger voice on these two remaining areas. For example, I do believe that the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, often referred to as UN Human Rights, is the real “jewel of the crown”.
This entity should not only be “bulletproofed” by any change but also strengthened with additional resources. No matter the intangibility of human rights, these universal norms and the values and principles underpinning them, do matter and will matter even more in the future.
And looking at how democracies are fraying and authoritarianism is becoming emboldened, upholding human rights must remain a priority. In relation to peace and security, the UN has already lost relevance and its role has already been shrinking.
Even the convening power of the Secretary General has been considerably dented. Yet, I am convinced that humanity needs an impartial and neutral player that can mediate political crises and mobilize its peace forces when required.
Certainly the peace agenda must also be revamped and there have already been some major propositions to make it stronger and more responsive and importantly, more credible.
It is time to re-look, revamp and implement them. It is staggering how in some of the most heinous conflicts affecting humanity these days, the mediating role and keep peacing capabilities of the UN are not even contemplated. The UN has become an afterthought.
Interlinked with the peace and security agenda, there is also a tremendous scope for the UN to step up its humanitarian and crises response.
With more conflicts and more nature-induced disasters turbocharged by climate warming and biodiversity losses, there is no doubt that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, must be strengthened and reinforced.
Any process of reform should focus on a simple mantra: retrench, reduce, reorganize wherever it is due and, strengthen in the areas where the UN can bring not only added value but make a real difference.
Questioning the UN’s role in the development sector does not mean minimize or dilute its voice at global level as advocate and defender of the Global South. But to be a good advocate or influencer, the UN must get rids of some practices that gave it a bad reputation.
Are the senior officers working at the UN80 reform process realizing it?
The UN really needs to focus on the needs of least developing nations, including the essential debate about the post Agenda 2030 future or on key new emerging areas like AI governance where, very recently, some important developments centered on the UN, have been attained.
The member nations meeting at the 80th UNGA this week in New York, need to have courage to make difficult choices.
This means that some partial retrenchment of the UN should not be opposed if it can serve bigger and higher goals and provide humanity with essential services that truly protect and transform lives. [IDN-InDepthNews]
*Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centered policymaking and a stronger and better United Nations.
Image: A view of the UN Headquarters, in New York. UN Photo/Loey Felipe