By Simone Galimberti*

KATHMANDU, Nepal | 22 September 2025 (WorldView) — 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 80^th 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 leaked memo, some bold ideas are being considered, including drastic mergers and the closure of specific programs and entities.

If implemented, these major reforms would be a welcome development, but at the same time, any major change at the UN must 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 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 for 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 it is here that a galaxy of agencies and programs has emerged, often with 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: to work with national governments.

Yet, too often, at country levels, UN agencies and programs end up 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 a very generous budget, but their results are modest.  The UN agencies and programs of the future should stop entertaining such endeavours.

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 believe that the UN is mainly responsible for enabling such reliance without empowering its counterparts, the governments of least developed nations and other developing countries, to truly take the lead 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 the 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 reset, 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 organisational development. In these extreme scenarios, the UN should run the whole government.

Let’s talk about what the new development capabilities of 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 the huge “baggage” that burdens it, even if it does not admit it.

Instead, UN entities could receive financial support from development partners and then re-grant it to governments and civil society organisations.

This means that governments’ agencies and offices, like their civil society counterparts, should put a serious effort into applying for a grant. Till now, it has never been the case.

If the activities to be funded are truly a serious priority, then it should not be a problem for government officials to roll up their sleeves. That’s what civil society-based organisations 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 can development aid 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 beneficial if it were to happen, as it would drastically reduce costs and make the entire organisation much quicker and more efficient.

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 practices and shift to a more nimble role, it could adopt the role of “watchdog”, including providing unbiased reviews and analyses of the “outputs” achieved by governments with funds 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 corrupt and inept.

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”, it means that it does not truly require 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 that 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 programs 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 that happened in 2019, should have an even 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 centralised mechanism, the “UN Development Entity” to which all the programs and agencies would report.

In practice, UNRC 3.0 means Resident Coordinators acting as CEOs to one “headquarters” with different divisions, each of which corresponds 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, with a hands-off approach, could enable the UN to have a significantly larger voice in 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 mobilise its peace forces when required.

Indeed, the peace agenda must also be revamped, and there have already been some major proposals to strengthen and make it 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 peacekeeping 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 crisis 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, reorganise 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 minimising or diluting its voice at the global level as an advocate and defender of the Global South. But to be a good advocate or influencer, the UN must get rid of some practices that gave it a bad reputation.

Are the senior officers working on the UN80 reform process realising it?

The UN needs to focus on the needs of the least developed nations, including the essential debate about the post-2030 future, as well as key new emerging areas like AI governance, where, very recently, some critical developments have been attained at the UN.

The member nations meeting at the 80th UNGA this week in New York need to have the courage to make difficult choices.

This means that some partial retrenchment of the UN should not be opposed if it can serve larger and more ambitious goals and provide humanity with essential services that truly protect and transform lives. [WorldView]

*Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centred policymaking and a stronger and better United Nations.

Image: A view of the UN Headquarters in New York. UN Photo/Loey Felipe