Rethinking the United Nations’ Field Presence

The next Secretary-General will inherit a United Nations (UN) that is, above all, a field organization. 70 percent of its personnel work in the field and close to 90 percent of its spending is devoted to operational activities in development, humanitarian, and peace operations. This is where the Organization is most visible and most often judged. It is also where its performance is shaped less by strategy and more by how it is funded.

Funding incentives shape field delivery more than strategic priorities do. And, the UN’s field presence will change whether the United Nations chooses to reform it or simply adjusts to financial pressure. This analysis unpacks three reform directions following this.

• The first is for the next Secretary-General to take a position on comparative advantage: to state where the UN should concentrate, where it should limit itself, and where it should shift from financing and implementation to advice and facilitation, and what must be present in a country, regionally, or at headquarters to deliver on this promise.
• Second, it should empower field leadership and consolidate the support behind it, giving Resident Coordinators and mission leaders greater authority to deliver (and if necessary, impose) coherence.
• The third, which requires member states’ active involvement, is to change the incentives that fund fragmentation: the balance between assessed and voluntary contributions, the discipline of earmarking, and a shift to a country-level financing model that identifies country needs and appropriate responses first, mobilizes financing around those priorities, and only then assigns implementation to agencies according to their comparative advantage.

None of these reforms will endure without member-state support. Member states ultimately control the funding decisions that reward fragmented delivery, from the balance between core and voluntary funding to the use of earmarking. The next Secretary-General can make these trade-offs visible and use the office’s operational authority to change how the system works. But lasting reform will require building a coalition of member states willing to change the incentives that shape what the UN does in the field. And ultimately, willing to enable some bold structural changes to an outdated architecture.

This paper is one of five commissioned by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University to inform the development of a practical reform roadmap for the next United Nations (UN) Secretary-General.

The series is organized around five governance challenges the next UN Secretary-General will inherit: the financing of the Organization, delivery in the field, management and leadership, restoring trust, and process overload. Each paper sets out the problem, distinguishes what lies within the Secretary-General’s authority from what requires intergovernmental agreement, and develops recommendations that can be implemented within existing political and legal frameworks. The analysis draws on sustained engagement with permanent missions and Secretariat officials in New York, and an expert consultation series convened with academics and think tanks across regions.

Together, the five papers aim to identify what is achievable, sequence it, and give member states and candidates for the office a substantive basis for engagement during the selection and transition period.