Does the UN Need Civil Society?

July 2026

By Katja Hemmerich

Article 71 of the UN Charter authorizes the Economic and Social Council to consult non-governmental organizations on matters within its competence while implicitly reconfirming that it is member states who are the only and real decision-makers, who ultimately determine how much - or how little - to engage with civil society. Systematic engagement of civil society organizations (CSOs) was begun primarily by UNDP and UNEP in the 1970s who sought their inputs in policy negotiations. While engagement between the UN and civil society has overall increased and expanded since then, it has been subject to ups and downs, depending on how willing member states are to involve them and potentially dilute their own decision-making authority. This tension is captured in the UN80 resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 2025, which makes a point of “Recognizing the central role of Member States in the reform process, which should be inclusive and transparent” (A/RES/79/318).

This tension was also evident at the Global Futures Forum, hosted by the Coalition for the UN We Need (C4UN) on Saturday, where many of the NGO participants wanted to assert a stronger role for civil society, while trying to glean from UN and member state participants what they needed from civil society in order to open the door to their participation. This month’s spotlight flips this debate around, to explore whether the UN actually needs civil society, and if so, why. The evidence from UN evaluations and independent research indicates that civil society provides a unique contribution that strengthens the UN’s accountability as well as its ability to deliver. For those engaged in UN reform who want a more effective and accountable UN, there is therefore a need to consider how and when a reformed UN should engage civil society - not just through consultative meetings but through clearly defined and managed processes and procedures that leverage their unique value-add.

Civil society’s contribution extends beyond policy inputs

Discussions in New York, including the Global Futures Forum on Saturday, naturally tend to gravitate towards arguments about how civil society participation has improved policy outcomes. Examples include how CSO advocacy led to the inclusion of SDG 16 on peace, justice and accountable institutions, which some member states were reluctant to include in the Sustainable Development Goals, or as the Permanent Representative of Jamaica, Ambassador Wallace noted, educating decision-makers on new issues, which led to the inclusion of the Declaration on Future Generations in the Pact for the Future. This influence on policy can be perceived as an additional channel for Global North injects, but as a recent study by the Latin American thinktank CEPEI has highlighted, the most successful influencers are transnational networks and Global South coalitions.

“Civil society actors – especially those embedded in transnational networks and Global South coalitions – play a pivotal role in informal diplomacy. Through technical briefings, annotated drafts, and real-time consultations, CSOs influence member state positions and shape the framing of resolutions. Their advocacy often determines which issues gain traction, how language is negotiated, and which constituencies are represented.” - CEPEI, "The Triple Disconnect", 2026

A key area where international organizations have seen a direct organizational benefit from civil society influence on policy-making is with respect to the adoption of more effective accountability mechanisms. Despite member states' rhetoric about improved accountability, it is actually civil society organizations whose lobbying has driven their expansion in particular in multilateral development banks (MDBs), as well as in the UN, where they successfully pushed for UNDP to adopt Social and Environmental Standards, and a related accountability mechanism for complaints and compliance reviews. Most research on the effectiveness of these complaints mechanisms is focused on MDBs, all of which now have a grievance procedure for community complaints. And that research demonstrates that the power imbalances between MDBs and the countries receiving loans or grants from them have been mitigated by the ability of communities or individuals to seek redress through complaints mechanisms, like the World Bank’s Inspection Panel (IP). These mechanisms improve the accountability of MDBs, by ensuring compliance with their own standards and improving the quality of programme outcomes:

“[The Inspection Panel] has reduced errors and at times corruption within Bank management, and made it harder to conduct shoddy analysis or rush projects to meet deadlines and lending targets. Transparency from the IP has facilitated the involvement of displaced and indigenous communities in WB policymaking through formal Action Plans, and functionally made the WB more accountable to the lives of those affected by projects.” - B. Sovacool, ‘Cooperative or Inoperative? Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank’s Inspection Panel’, 2017

Research also demonstrates that this accountability effect is most consistent when local communities are supported in submitting their complaints by national and international NGOs, each of whom provide a different but complementary function that moves them from advocates for accountability mechanisms to enablers of actual accountability of MDBs. This is good for all of their member states, while also increasing accountability to those countries receiving grants or loans.

“These [grievance mechanisms] can compensate for—and complement—weaknesses in a state’s administrative sovereignty, but also bypass—and threaten it. This is because grievances may not be just viewed as challenging the actions of the MDB, but potentially viewed as an act against the sovereign state, who agreed to the loan. Although this emphasizes the importance of transnational administration for states, the power of these mechanisms to substantively alter national-level policy arrangements is limited; there are only a handful of isolated cases where grievances have contributed to changes in national law.” - E. Gunaydin & S. Park, "Accountability enablers? The role of transnational activism in the use of the multilateral development bank grievance mechanisms", (2024)

Why the UN needs civil society to deliver on its mandates

Civil society’s positive impact on international organizations’ performance and accountability is also demonstrated through their engagement in operational activities in a variety of different UN contexts. Both academe and the UN have recognized that civil society participation in the work of UN human rights treaty bodies improve their fact-finding capacity and by extension the quality of their recommendations, and that CSOs are key enablers of effective monitoring and implementation of those recommendations on the ground - something both I and the founder of CEDAW’s Committee of Trinidad and Tobago, who participated in Saturday’s Global Futures Forum have seen firsthand in our work with treaty bodies. In addition, the accountability effects of individual complaints mechanisms of human rights treaty bodies are also strengthened when civil society supports petitioners, according to a 2024 study, much in the same way as with the MDB grievance mechanisms.

Strangely, there has been a lot less analysis about the impact of CSOs on the UN’s development and humanitarian work. While putting together a synthesis of evidence on the impact of NGO implementing partners for C4UN, I was surprised to discover that UN evaluations - and those of the Multilateral Organization Performance Network (MOPAN) never systematically compare the effectiveness of implementation modalities. Yet, a closer review of evaluations highlights that NGO implementing partners have clearly contributed to improved outcomes for UN organizations, in particular because of their local knowledge and established relationships and trust with local communities - assets that the UN cannot readily recreate.  As one of the only UN evaluation documents to systematically collect information on the effectiveness of implementing partnerships, WFP’s 2023 "Synthesis of evidence and lessons on WFP’s cooperating partners from centralized and decentralized evaluations” (OEV/2023/022) noted that implementing partners provided invaluable contributions to all four of WFP’s strategic objectives with NGOs providing strong contributions to the provision of lifesaving assistance, the improvement of nutrition, health and education outcomes, and improved and sustainable livelihoods.

“The evaluations found that cooperating partnerships were key to WFP’s life-saving assistance, enhancing its ability to reach vulnerable people, access hard-to-reach areas and improve targeting.” - WFP, "Synthesis of evidence and lessons on WFP’s cooperating partners from centralized and decentralized evaluations” (OEV/2023/022), para. 13, (2023)

The data point that many UN evaluations do pick up on quite systematically is that NGO implementers often have different levels of capacity, and those with weaker capacity can create performance risks or challenges. Many of these capacity challenges are exacerbated by how the UN manages those implementing arrangements, for instance due to delays in finalizing agreements and disbursing funds; poor two-way communication and sharing of project and administrative information; and limited or ineffective support for NGO overhead costs or training, often resulting from donor conditions. When the UN works with NGOs to address their capacity gaps, in particular through feedback mechanisms that are becoming more commonplace in UN agencies, funds and programmes like WFP, UNICEF and UNOPS for example, the UN also tends to improve its own procedures for managing NGO implementers and gains evidence that it can take back to donors to sometimes negotiate a reduction of the conditions that undermine strong performance.

UN reforms should leverage civil society’s value-add

This brings us full circle to our initial assertion that anyone interested in an effective and accountable UN should find ways to facilitate civil society engagement in the work of the UN. The evidence demonstrates that engagement of CSOs in different contexts and aspects of the UN’s work is already adding value to how well it delivers, how accountable it is, and how ambitious it can be in setting international goals and standards - all of which is key for rebuilding trust in the UN across stakeholders. Accordingly, engagement of civil society in UN structures and processes should be part of the current reform processes, and should leverage their unique contributions that are derived from their role as independent stakeholders not just in the policymaking realm, but also in the delivery of results. Leveraging these contributions should rely on evidence to understand not only the best modalities for how to engage civil society, but also how to leverage their diversity, in particular the complementary but often diverse benefits and competitive advantages of local, national and international NGOs and related coalitions and networks.