In March 2025, when United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres presented his views on reforming the organization, seizing on its 80th anniversary, most media attention focused on the possibility of downsizing UN personnel (workstream 1) and restructuring operations (workstream 3). However, the second of the three workstreams of his proposal addressed the reform and implementation of mandates, the instructions that member states, through the General Assembly, the Security Council, or other bodies, convey to the UN Secretariat and its funds and programs. While there is broad consensus on the need to improve and revitalize the mandates that guide the UN’s work, previous attempts have fizzled. This text will review some of the causes of unsuccessful reform attempts, the challenges ahead, and also focus on the case of meetings and report streamlining—a good example of a mandate reform area that might hold promise. Finally, it will review developments since UN80 was announced and set out suggestions for countering the challenges in this workstream.
Understanding the Mandate Hydra
Of the three workstreams in UN80, the implementation of mandates received from member states is the least subject to being worked out by the UN Secretariat, since it reflects the decisions made by member states through the General Assembly and other intergovernmental bodies that establish the work for the organization. In the Secretary-General’s words, mandates are “a request or directive for action set out in the UN Charter, a resolution or decision by a UN intergovernmental organ.” When the Under-Secretary-General for policy, who is in charge of UN80, presented the key question of whether the complex mandate landscape could be streamlined in June 2025, he did not provide answers but sought reactions from the representatives of member states in the room. This informed the later report presented by the Secretary-General in early August, in which he submitted his recommendations to the UN membership and made it “absolutely clear: mandates are the business of Member States… and they are the sole property and responsibility of Member States.”
Some form of mandate review has been attempted in the twenty years since the 2005 World Summit. In 2006, the Secretary-General’s Report A/60/733 presented an analysis and recommendations to what was already well understood to be an unwieldy problem. However, discussions within member states ended far from the hoped-for overhaul. In a LinkedIn post last November and in her briefing to delegations, Minh-Thu Pham, a former UN policy advisor, recalled that member states ignored the report’s analysis and recommendations and instead spent two years focused on the mandates’ database contained in the report, leading to “a tedious and draining bookkeeping exercise that fizzled out due to exhaustion.” A decade later, in the aftermath of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the General Assembly agreed to work on the alignment of its development agenda and that of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), in light of the new development paradigm that the 2030 Agenda aspired to embody. The effort consumed hundreds of hours of meetings and negotiations among delegates and ended with no substantive outcome of reform. Exhaustion among delegations was again a factor, while the inertia of business as usual and a lack of urgency ultimately brought the process to a rest.
Mandates represent work being done by specific offices at the United Nations. Those entities are not only executors but also key stakeholders in the outcomes of negotiations leading to the renewal or a mandate. Specific member states also have close kinship (if not ownership through extra budgetary contributions) with mandates, mostly because of their domestic policy directives and political priorities, but also because their nationals may be the officials carrying them out. It is fairly common for UN resolutions that first created a mandate to be rolled over in subsequent years, keeping the mandate unchanged, at times in cycles lasting several years. Although most UN entities cite a resolution from recent years as their source, many have been carried over from further back in the past. The report from the Secretary-General and the new website on this issue (mandates.un.org) are clear: dozens of mandates trace their origins to a common resolution, and some still refer to superseded processes, such as the Millennium Development Goals.
There is also a North-South dynamic at play, where the main contributors to the UN budget have been the most vocal in calling for trimming mandates to reduce costs and avoid scattering resources, thereby affecting delivery. On the other hand, the Group of 77 (G77) and China, the coalition integrating most developing member states, has regularly expressed concern about weakening development efforts in the interest of budget cuts when addressing mandate reform. Arguments regarding efficiencies and redirecting resources to development efforts on the ground or supporting capacity in the Secretariat have not been entirely persuasive in the past. One example was the ECOSOC alignment process, where the G77’s interest in preserving the integrity of all mandates went so far as to affirm that duplication was not necessarily a problem. On the other hand, when cuts are discussed in areas such as human rights and gender equality, it is mostly the Western bloc that raises objections to some streamlining proposals, leading to further arguments about double standards from all sides. Internal group dynamics also make it difficult for negotiators to reach significant breakthroughs. Either by solidarity with a concern from a specific member state or after rough and strenuous negotiations within the groups, positions tend to be quite rigid by the time they reach the negotiation table.
Additionally, intergovernmental negotiation dynamics at the UN favor stasis. Most resolutions in the General Assembly and ECOSOC are adopted by consensus, allegedly to show a united international community on a specific subject, particularly when dealing with development and budgetary issues. One effect of striving for consensus (in practice, unanimity) is that, among the multiple compromises leading to a resolution acceptable to all member states, addressing a specific area of a mandate serves as a bargaining chip to be used elsewhere in the negotiation. In the cyclical process of negotiations, the failure of previous attempts to streamline or even review the mandates often dissuades delegations from insisting on the issue, pivoting to other areas where their efforts may be more successful.
Meetings and Reports: Low-Hanging Fruit or Poisoned Apples?
As a concrete, prolific output of mandates, a substantive section of the mandate reform report was dedicated to meetings and reports. The Secretariat identified that over USD 360 million is dedicated annually to service meetings of the intergovernmental bodies (through conference officials, interpreters, security, etc.) and to issuing documents, amounting to about 2,300 pages daily (requiring editing and most of them translation into the six official languages of the UN). Those USD 360 million amount to about 10% of the regular budget, making them a tantalizing target for budget streamlining. Reducing the number of meetings and the volume of reports is seen by many as the most palatable way to save at the UN, without affecting work on the ground and programs that deliver direct benefits to people around the world. Whatever momentum the second stream in the UN80 initiative has gained in recent months is partly because some sort of success is seen as achievable in rationalizing the number of documents produced by the UN and the gatherings to discuss them.
The Secretary-General has been careful to give deference to member states and to acknowledge the importance of holding meetings and issuing reports. However, recalling a quote attributed to George R. R. Martin, “nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts,” the Secretary-General’s report is clear, stating that “meetings and reports keep Member States informed of key developments and allow them to provide necessary guidance… but they are also expensive.” The report also says that longer texts may add value, but “more complex texts can also obscure priorities and detract from potential impact,” that downloading statistics are not proof of a report’s utility… but are an indication of a need for wider discussions.” In brief, there was also “reporting for reporting’s sake.”
UN reports often go unnoticed and are even intentionally ignored by delegates in charge of the subject matter the document is addressing. The Secretary-General noted that the most popular reports were downloaded about 5,500 times each, while over 20 percent were downloaded fewer than 1,000 times, adding that “downloading doesn’t necessarily mean reading.” In fact, delegates will often say in the hallways of UN headquarters that “nobody reads the reports.”
It is rare for a UN text to make it into mainstream media due to its technical nature. However, there is a sense that the human and financial resources required to draft and issue the documents do not necessarily justify the downloads made by member state missions or researchers. In intergovernmental processes, delegates may rely on some of the language and recommendations contained in a report, but it usually goes unnoticed. However, requesting a new report without further direction to the Secretariat is mostly uncontroversial, with the rollover in the mandate perpetuating the cycle of yet another unnoticed report, without reflection on how and when it may be needed.
Similarly, many intergovernmental meetings are scarcely attended. Formal meetings in the main committees of the UN are increasingly seen as an outdated ritual to slog through, keeping delegates from more substantive work. There is some irony in the fact that the UN had to rely on the concept of “interactive dialogue” to foster more vigorous deliberation in intergovernmental bodies. For a time, these interactive dialogues, usually convened by the President of the General Assembly, were seen as a way to move multilateral dialogue forward through panel discussions; however, many have fallen into a cycle of holding meetings for the sake of holding meetings. The UN webcast struggles to avoid showing a nearly empty room for a meeting that still requires full servicing of interpreters and conference officials.
As obvious as eliminating an unnecessary meeting or report would be, the path to doing so can quickly become steep. As with most mandates, they have to be explicitly extinguished through a resolution, an action that may become a key issue in negotiations but is usually an afterthought when dealing with what are considered more substantial issues in the process. Without the explicit revocation of a mandate, a superseding mandate may still leave in place its predecessors’ meeting and reporting requirements. When negotiating which meetings or reports should be eliminated, reduced, or updated, the intergovernmental dynamics mentioned above come into play. What is a duplication or unnecessary turn rapidly becomes a geopolitical discussion. Many delegations do not want to “open the door” to further trimming of a mandate if its report and meeting are to be affected. This low-hanging fruit serves as the entry point to more substantive discussions held across the system on operational mandates and therefore also requires a comprehensive, cross-cutting perspective, rather than the granularity that tends to drain negotiators’ energy in headquarters.
Mounting the First Steps of Mandate Reform at UN80
Most member states welcomed the Secretary-General’s initiative, and during high-level week this September, there were multiple expressions of support to UN80 by heads of state and government in the general debate. And, earlier this summer, the Russian Federation drafted a resolution reaffirming member states’ role in reform efforts. The text, resolution 79/318, was adopted by consensus, seen by some delegations as rather innocuous, but addressing concerns about the possibility of a Secretariat-driven process.
After the Secretary-General’s presentation of report A/80/318 in early August, the outgoing President of the General Assembly submitted a draft decision establishing an Informal Ad Hoc Working Group charged to consider the proposals in the SG’s report. This new entity is co-chaired by the Ambassadors of New Zealand and Jamaica, and began its work by the time of the high-level week (September 2025). It is tasked with providing an update to the General Assembly in December 2025, concluding its work by March 2026. Although creating a body for the specific discussion of this topic and providing a clear timeline holds promise, it also reminds of previous processes, such as the Ad Hoc Working Group on Revitalization of the General Assembly, established twenty years ago.
A notable caveat in what came to be Decision 79/571, which created the Informal Ad Hoc Working Group, drafted after the Office of the President of the General Assembly held “consultations,” is that it encourages member states to strive for consensus in their deliberations. However, it does not mandate a consensus outcome. This may allow some leeway in case some isolated delegation would still stand in the way of a widely accepted outcome. Still, this new intergovernmental body, brought into existence over the summer—to the surprise of many delegations—will face a number of challenges. Some of them had already surfaced by the time the General Assembly formally adopted the draft decision. The G77 regretted that some of its concerns were not taken into account, particularly that the work to be done would clash with the regular substantive work of the main segment of the General Assembly, from October to December, overburdening delegations. This also denotes some lack of urgency in favor of the regular order of business at the United Nations.
The co-chairs established a timeline for briefings and consultations as part of a “discovery phase” to gather views and build shared understandings to advance towards a “production phase.” In the timeline, the focus on mandates will be through their cycle of creation, implementation, and review. So far, the briefings and statements from delegations have tended to be mostly technical, even resembling the budget committee discussions. The idea of focusing on the future of the mandates rather than litigating the past and falling into the same dynamics of previous processes has also been stressed through the briefings and consultations held so far. While the more existential and politically charged discussions should happen later in the process, there is still much of a tentative discussion with delegations still aiming to understand the overall goals of this process and, eventually, what any intergovernmental negotiation would actually entail.
Some Recommendations
The report A/80/318 of the Secretary-General presented a series of recommendations to transform how the UN works, particularly at headquarters. However, it does not address the dynamics at play among member states and the pressures from other stakeholders that have derailed previous efforts. In that sense, presenting the report in the middle of summer and referring to UN80 at the opening of high-level week is not entirely consequential. A sustained presence and lobbying from the Secretariat is necessary to pressure member states into action. Recognizing that mandate reform is a member-state-driven process should not stop the Secretary-General from continuing to engage in it and being as vocal as necessary to keep it from stalling or becoming so tangled in details that it loses focus. The same goes for the current President of the General Assembly.
If mandate streamlining or strengthening is to succeed, it needs to affect the interests of all member states. Already, some of the data and charts in the report and on the dedicated website seem to point to a focus on streamlining the organization’s development sector. That would be a non-starter for the G77, while the United States is calling for a return to the UN’s focus on the peace and security pillar. Since budgeting remains at the core of current discussions, a clearer sense of where resource optimization would lead is necessary. If, for example, meetings and reports are trimmed, there needs to be a sense of how that will reflect on support on the ground. Specific cases where savings in the UN headquarters feed into specific programs could be presented and bring interest from a wide array of member states, keeping in mind that the budgetary process of the Secretariat and approval by the General Assembly will continue through its regular process. It will be necessary and healthy for the UN80 process to address the interlinkages between workstreams 1 and 2.
Despite the prominence of the UN80 initiative, the process of mandate reform may still be too low-stakes at this stage to merit the attention of decision-makers among UN delegations, although the briefings and first rounds of comments have shown engagement from the membership. As they enter a new stage in their timeline, the co-chairs of the working group need to highlight this process over the other dozen or so intergovernmental negotiations that are guided by co-facilitators appointed by the President of the General Assembly, not to mention the close to three hundred resolutions negotiated during the main session of the General Assembly. UN80 needs to have enough weight on its own, asserting itself over the tendency to focus on the regular flow of business at headquarters.
One way to keep attention in the process is to present a draft outcome that is ambitious, if not bordering on outrageous, for member states. While continuing to focus on the future, propose deleting mandates that still cite documents from the twentieth century (it is already 2025). In terms of the life cycle of the mandates, it makes it harder to create new ones, including by having to eliminate two mandates for each new initiative brought forward. Establish automatic sunset clauses for resolutions, reports, and meetings—even including agenda items in the Main Committees. Propose limiting thematic reports to two-pagers with actionable recommendations and defined timelines for results. Allow for format changes that privilege visual aids. Some documents, such as on budgetary issues need to be longer, but a strong mandate capping the length of reports and meetings will force the system into a leaner way of presenting things—making it easier for delegations to act on the recommendations by the UN system.
An ambitious zero draft is indispensable, considering the dynamics of UN negotiations. Previous experience shows that a mandate to review mandates is no guarantee that such a review will lead to a substantive outcome. Previous efforts ended with a face-saving conclusion. The mandate of the current Working Group should not be extended. Although mandate review has proven to be a titanic task, adding a few more months or another year will only push negotiation deadlines further down the road. Instead, if absolutely necessary, the Working Group on Revitalization of the General Assembly should be tasked with continuing any pending work that is not achieved in the current timeline. In a context of cuts and threats of defunding the organization, the old multilateral adage that “everyone wins something and loses something” may not hold true. But a process with awareness that everyone will be losing could ultimately be the path to success.
COVID-19 demonstrated the degree to which the United Nations could adapt in the face of extraordinary circumstances. The pandemic forced the modernization of numerous processes and working methods, many of which were considered infeasible back in February of 2020. A similar change can happen when handling mandate reform. In the face of painful cuts and transformations expected in the other two workstreams of the UN80 initiative, there is potential for a bright spot in advancing the United Nations. One should be hopeful that by the time UN85 comes around, mandate review will be something that recalls multilateral achievement.
Bruno Ríos is a career diplomat with over ten years of experience at the United Nations. He served at the Office of the President of the General Assembly and as a delegate in most of the intergovernmental bodies at UN headquarters, including the Security Council where he was in charge of issues related to peacekeeping, the Western Hemisphere and children in armed conflict. He is a graduate of NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and was a consultant to the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
