It’s unclear if the conditions are currently in place for the major structural update the UN needs. Timing is everything—as the UN’s founders understood—and one has to wonder whether today’s political polarization, bandwidth constraints, and scarce political capital create some risk to embarking on open-heart surgery without a shared strategic vision of the endpoint. Arguments on how to get there are healthy, but if there is too big a gap between member states on what “there” actually is, the UN risks being condemned to years of protracted debate, introspection, and uncertainty.
Robert Piper, CIC Senior Fellow, unpacks the UN80 reform process and “unfinished” work of development reform in this new guest blog over at IPI’s Global Observatory.