Assessing the Ability of the UN80 Action Plan to Effect Real Change

9 November 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

On Friday, 7 November, the UN Secretary-General (SG) published the UN80 Action Plan. The Action Plan aims to enhance transparency and accountability by outlining clearly who is responsible for what with respect to UN80 reforms between now and the end of 2026, when this Secretary-General’s term ends. It is therefore a key accountability tool for member states and stakeholders to track what is to be achieved over the next 14 months.

But more than that, it also provides a clear outline for how the UN80 reform process is going to be managed - something that research has highlighted is as important to the success of UN reform efforts as the actual content of a reform initiative. The Action Plan sets out a Steeting Committee, Task Force and a process by which these will manage UN80 reforms over the next 14 months. In doing so, the UN80 team appears to have taken onboard the 2019 criticism levied by the Joint Inspection Unit that:

“A minority – though not an insignificant number – of United Nations system organizational reforms over the past decade continue to focus on what needs to change in terms of structures, systems and processes, without also addressing how it should change, and the management of that change.” JIU/REP/2019/4 pg. iii

The JIU and the Multilateral Performance Network (MOPAN) as well as several academic institutions have all highlighted that UN reforms are the most successful in effecting change when they focus as much on process as on substance. Our spotlight this month uses that research to assess the UN80 Action Plan, and provide insights into how UN80 Work Package Leads, their teams, and member states can engage with the Plan to strengthen its chances for success.

What drives real change across the UN?

There are endless opinions and theories on what drives real change in the UN. What are the forces that really lead to effective reform across the UN? Is it, as this US administration asserts, external pressure from member states through the reduction of funding until the UN executes reforms? Or is it the quality of leaders and their capacity to make change happen, as suggested by Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka Group that runs IKEA, and Sweden’s current candidate for UN High Commissioner of Refugees? Or, is the concrete ability to motivate and engage UN staff and a change management process the real success factor, as implied by the staff unions who have long criticized their exclusion from the UN80 process?

A handful of researchers, as well as MOPAN and JIU have assembled a wealth of evidence to answer these questions. Their work highlights that reform processes are effective when UN leadership is able to engage member state and governing bodies along with staff in the process. This is not necessarily a sequential or series of separate processes - successful reform efforts have engaged early with member states so they can help shape the reforms, and created space for ‘intrapreneurship’ by staff members to help design improvements. Case studies of the ILO and FAO, as well as UNAIDs, and empirical analyses of strategic change efforts all conclude, like the JIU, that:  the likelihood of success increases when the legislative direction provided by governance bodies is aligned with the leadership vision for change, and that vision is understood and supported by the staff who will implement it.

Most reforms that led to change in the UN since the late 1990s have been driven by leadership rather than direct external pressure or demands from member states. That said, UN executive heads’ motivation for change was predominantly to address performance gaps, which in some cases were raised by member states formally and informally, and in some cases also by partners or civil society. Poor performance can quickly lead to reductions in funding, so financial considerations do motivate reforms. But at the same time, reforms that were focused solely on cost-cutting did not tend to lead to change as much as reforms that had a broader focus on improving performance.

An executive heads’ leadership abilities to engage, align and develop support for change amongst both member states and staff are therefore important for successful reform efforts. But executive heads’ skills alone are not enough to ensure that real change happens. Executive heads, their leadership teams and their managers need to actively plan, manage and monitor the change process, which must include a clear change management plan. As the Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) highlighted in 2019:

“Senior leaders need to sponsor the change. While leadership by the executive head is necessary, this alone is not a sufficient condition for success. A clear governance structure for change management-related reforms is necessary to ensure that relevant stakeholders can influence the process, but their role and structure can vary depending on organizational configurations and the type of reform.” - JIU/REP/2019/4 pg. iv

Trying to initiate, obtain approval for, and manage a reform process that leads to real change in one UN entity, is therefore phenomenally complex and challenging. This may be one of the reasons why, despite the proliferation of reforms across the UN system which have generally had similar objectives to improve performance and accountability and deliver more efficiently, reform processes have predominantly been entity-specific, characterized by:

“individual reform patterns and independent problem solving instead, due also to the lacking influence of a harmonizing instrument”. - Grohs and Rasch (2021). “Administrative convergence in the United Nations system? Patterns of administrative reform in four United Nations organizations over time”.

Conversely, there are very few examples of successful change processes across the UN system. It is harder therefore to understand how to drive such system level change, although Drs. Grohs and Rasch do note instances where system-wide coordination or technical bodies have managed to effect change, for instance with respect to human resources improvements driven by the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) and the UN System Chief Executives Board (CEB). More recently, MOPAN’s UN80 brief, “Doing Better With Less: Unlocking Efficiency in the UN”, which consolidates evidence from 15 of its evaluations between 2023 and 2025 also notes that the CEB has had some success in nudging system wide change. These include increasing UN entities’ mutual recognition of administrative policies and processes which facilitates shared services and collaboration while reducing duplicative processes. According to MOPAN, while a growing number of UN entities are embarking on the use of shared services and gaining efficiency benefits since the 2017 round of UN reforms, progress has been

“uneven and generally slow… Several barriers have hindered broader adoption. These include the absence of a system-wide co-ordination mechanism, comprehensive operational guidelines and objective criteria for identifying best practices.” - MOPAN (2025), “Doing Better With Less: Unlocking Efficiency in the UN”, pg. 22

How well does the UN80 Action Plan leverage these drivers of change?

Armed with an understanding of what has driven effective change at entity and system level across the UN, we can now assess how the UN80 Action Plan stacks up.

On the positive side, the Action Plan, and the Steering Committee and Task Forces that it sets out, are clearly an effort to create a governance structure for the change process with a system-wide coordination body. In some cases, existing coordination mechanisms such as the High Level Committee for Management (HLCM) are leveraged for Work Packages that are aiming for system-level change, such as the development of a Unified Services Roadmap (Work Package 14). The UN80 Action Plan therefore addresses some of the most common shortcomings found in previous reform efforts.

The UN80 Action Plan dedicates a full page to how member states will be engaged and places a clear responsibility on Work Package leads to consult member states as they work to implement their Indicative Actions. Although there is a detailed and somewhat complicated graphic on page 10 that implies that the member states’ UN80 Working Group is aligned or working in parallel with UN80 Action Plan, there is a general lack of clarity about how the various UN governing bodies will be engaged. The risk of a lack of coherence in how member states are engaged informally or formally through legislative bodies and the messaging that they may receive seems significant.

A particularly important weakness in the UN80 Action Plan is that there is no mention of a process or a responsibility to consult staff, either in designing the Indicative Actions or with respect to how they may be affected by mergers, restructuring or efficiencies. At the same time, because the Action Plan does not indicate that staff will be consulted after the Indicative Actions have been agreed, it therefore does not imply that staff should be expressly excluded at this stage.

How should UN Leaders and Member States engage with the Action Plan?

Despite some of its shortcomings, the UN80 Action Plan provides a framework to help guide the changes that the UN system is being forced to make. And more importantly, it is sufficiently flexible to allow Work Package Leads and member states to fill some of the gaps.

There is nothing in the Action Plan, for instance, that prevents Work Package leads from consulting staff. Nor is there anything that prevents the Steering Committee and Work Package Leads from coming up with a strategy on how to engage with member states through informal consultations and via formal legislative bodies while avoiding duplication and overloading member state capacities. And as the Action Plan itself indicates, it is a living document that will be regularly updated, so these elements can still be built into the process.

Work Package leads and their teams, who want to effect real change - despite all the challenges - should therefore exploit the lessons learnt from past reforms. They should leverage the creativity and commitment of staff to help come up with options for how to do business differently, while respecting their obligation to consult staff on initiatives that affect them. Aside from building greater staff engagement for implementing the change, these consultations also provide Work Package leads with information they can use to identify where staff and member state concerns are aligned, or can be addressed through a similar solution and build that into their change proposals.

Work Package Leads should also leverage their leadership and management teams not only to help manage these consultation processes, but also to design a change management plan to accompany their Indicative Actions. There is a wealth of best practices that have been compiled not just by the JIU and MOPAN studies cited in this spotlight, but also by the UN System Staff College (UNSSC) with a focus on the three UN80 workstreams,

Alternatively, Work Package leads who do not think change is feasible or required can simply check the box and deliver their Indicative Action precisely as stated in the Action Plan - and save themselves a lot of work.

Similarly, those member states who are not concerned about the effectiveness of the UN after UN80, can focus their legislative interventions exclusively the amount of money saved by the end of 2026.

But member states, who would like the UN to effect genuine reform that does not fundamentally weaken the organization, should evaluate the proposals emanating from the UN80 Action Plan based on their substance as well as the process. Does the substance of the proposal meet member state concerns and respond to the evidence of UN weaknesses? Has the proposal been developed in consultation with member states and staff and is it accompanied by a realistic change management plan.

No reform proposal will be perfect, nor will it be able to meet all stakeholder needs - but those change proposals which have made the effort to meet a significant proportion of both member state and staff concerns, and can demonstrate a realistic plan to change both processes and behaviors along with creating efficiencies, will significantly increase the chances of effecting the real reform that is so desperately needed.

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