From Data to Trust: The UN’s Transparency Challenge

September 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

On 2 September the General Assembly agreed in the context of UN80 to set up an adhoc intergovernmental body, chaired by Jamaica and New Zealand and open to all member states “to improve the creation, delivery and review of mandates”. In the same decision, the General Assembly indicated it was looking forward to further UN80 proposals from the SG “to enhance the overall effectiveness, efficiency, responsiveness, resilience and overall impact of the United Nations system across all three pillars of its work”. In a recent briefing, the UN80 team confirmed that more of their work would be presented in the coming weeks. With the adhoc working group required to present an interim report by 15 December and the Fifth Committee aiming to find consensus on the revised budget estimates for 2026, which reportedly include an 18.7% reduction in posts, we will see the words impact, results, efficiency and transparency used a lot this fall.

Based on past debates, a likely refrain will be that if the UN can be more transparent and demonstrate clearly that it is effective, efficient and accountable, this will build trust in the organization and make it easier for governments to justify spending. This is the same logic that has underpinned many of the management reforms over the last decade, as well as the Global Funding Compact with member states. Yet, as all UN Executive Boards have repeatedly heard over the last several years, while the UN has met its targets, member states have not. Nor have the reforms prevented the current financial crisis. So our spotlight this month examines whether there is evidence to support this linear assumption that more transparency leads to greater funding, and new approaches to transparency inspired by the latest research on what drives public (mis)trust in foreign aid.

Transparency at the UN

In many ways the UN is a phenomenally transparent organization - every resolution from 1945 onwards, along with the related Secretary-General’s report and verbatim minutes of the formal meetings are available online in the Official Document System and UN libraries for any of us to download. More recently, the current Secretary-General has created the Transparency Gateway at open.un.org with dashboards on UN expenses and financing, programme budget and results information, and country level action among others “to facilitate access to transparency information from across the UN System and the UN Secretariat”. Making data on funding flows accessible is at the heart of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), and virtually all OECD donor countries have similar transparency portals to show the public what their foreign aid budgets are being spent on. And yet, the UN continues to struggle to convince member states, and more importantly their voting publics, that it is a transparent organization that has impact and one worth investing in through foreign aid budgets.

According to IATI it has 1,025,550 development and humanitarian activities published to its standards with 1,811 publishers who contribute data for decision-making an accountability. At a systems level, the idea is that increased transparency of how governments, multilateral organizations and civil society spend their money should allow the public to understand (and correct misunderstandings) about how their taxes are being spent, and provide feedback on those choices directly or indirectly. This feedback from the public, or receivers of transparency data, in turn informs changes to policies by the senders of that transparency data, thereby increasing accountability and trust in those institutions and greater public support for international assistance. For all these reasons, transparency portals have become the norm both for donors and multilateral organizations, including most UN entities and development banks (with the World Bank and UNDP tend to score particularly high in IATI’s ratings). But new research demonstrates that the linear logic of increased access to data on spending leading to greater trust in those institutions is more complicated - and more fragile - in reality.

Fragile Transparency Loops

What a new study of the German transparency portal highlights is that rather than a linear relationship between senders and receivers of transparency data, it is a loop that also includes mediators who interpret that data, given its complexity. Part of the problem is, as we all know that data on results and impact of international programmes as hard to quantify, articulate and measure. IATI itself is continually working to address this problem, and this is consistently an area where most of the portals it reviews receive the lowest scores, including the German portal, which otherwise has very high rankings across IATI standards. What the researchers from the German Institute of Development and Sustainability highlight is that all the information on such portals is very technical and useful for practitioners familiar with international assistance programming, but not necessarily useable or comprehensible for lay people. As Drs. Janus and Roethel of IDOS adroitly point out:

“Transparency may be opaque from the start”. - H. Janus & T. Roethel, 'Foreign aid transparency amid politicization’, Development Policy Review, 2025.

Organizations who share transparency data on international assistance are therefore reliant on ‘mediators’ like journalists, think tanks or social media commentators to simplify, interpret and share this information. Such mediators can have their own agenda or may provide partial or incorrect information - unintentionally, or intentionally. While Dr. Janus and Roethel’s study found that the few mediators who specifically cited the transparency portal stayed true to the information presented, there was also significant misinformation on the same topic on social media by commentators who may have consulted the portal without citing it. This is why Drs. Janus and Roethel’s argue that what we typically assume should be a linear relationship between senders and receivers of transparency data is in fact a fragile transparency loop with multiple points where it can break down because of how information is presented. In the case of the UN, which relies on member state governments as an additional mediating layer, the risks of information breakdowns are even greater.

An older, but surprisingly prescient series of articles by Devex in 2018 on public attitudes to foreign aid in the UK, maps out how these breakdowns happen and the consequences. Devex demonstrates how UK tabloids have intentionally taken approaches aimed at undermining support for foreign aid, and cites an anonymous Daily Mail journalist, who clearly indicated how s/he exploited the UK’s portal DevTracker:

“Based on whatever people are upset about at the time — bin collection or whatever — I basically just go into DevTracker and find something to compare it to [in terms of funding levels], because people are already upset about a lack of funding for something that relates directly to them ... All you have to do is draw that comparison to some use of aid that [sounds] questionable.” - M. Anders, “Bad news: How does media coverage affect public attitudes toward aid?”, Devex, 9 March 2018

It’s easy to assume that tabloid readers in most donor countries are already negatively pre-disposed to international assistance. But the same Devex article highlights fascinating research by Humankind that such assumptions underestimate the impact of such mediators. When surveying a representative sample from the British public, Humankind found that young people in particular who claimed to be aware of the tabloids’ lack of objectivity and said they supported foreign aid, had nevertheless absorbed a lot of the negative portrayals of international actors.

“While young people may be more likely to claim a concern for global poverty as a core belief, they are still absorbing the cascade of often-exaggerated claims about corruption, abuse, and inflated salaries, often through more expedient forms of media.” - M. Anders, “Bad news: How does media coverage affect public attitudes toward aid?”, Devex, 9 March 2018

Does this mean transparency portals are pointless?

While transparency portals can clearly be manipulated by mediators, they are not a waste of effort. In fact, another study in 2024 on UK public attitudes to foreign aid found that:

“transparency reforms are among the most effective institutional interventions for increasing public support.” - M. Heinzel et al., ‘Transparency and citizen support for public agencies: The case of foreign aid’, Governance, 2024.

What this study and others on public attitudes to foreign aid in major donor countries in Europe as well as the US highlight is that how transparency data and information is conveyed, both by mediators and the sending organizations makes a big difference in how it is received by the public. And this goes beyond simply correcting misunderstandings and misinformation, such as the particularly common misperception in the US and UK that foreign aid budgets comprise a disproportionate proportion of overall government spending. (Numerous studies have found that prior to the slashing of aid budgets over the last year, both American and British citizens believed foreign aid constitutes a substantial share of the government budget, ranging from 18% to 28%, while it actually represented less than 1% in both countries).

A key issue found by Drs. Heinzl, Reinsberg and Swedlund is that more than just data on spending, information about how institutions are continuously working to ensure transparency, and organizational practices and decisions to enforce good governance improve public perceptions about international assistance.

“Across the experiments, we find strong evidence that transparency increases support for the aid agency. In the monadic experiment, we find that simply providing more details on the FCDO's transparency efforts increases support for aid through the agency by close to 12%. This is a sizable swing for a minor alteration in the information presented to respondents. Moreover, we find that treatment effects are largely driven by those who least support foreign aid and trust the civil service the least. That is, transparency works best when citizens are the most skeptical about aid and the civil service.” - M. Heinzel et al., ‘Transparency and citizen support for public agencies: The case of foreign aid’, Governance, 2024.

Additional research also provides insights into how to address the dilemma of demonstrating results and impact. A key reason why foreign aid easily loses support from voting publics is because voters undertake a cost-benefit analysis about how their government should be spending its limited funds. And their cost benefit analysis, as highlighted in a recent study of US attitudes is somewhat different than that of government policymakers, diplomats and civil servants. While the latter consider strategic objectives of building relations with key partners, asserting soft power and influence and sustaining a rules-based international order, the public has a simpler cost benefit analysis. Foreign aid is spent to benefit others, while public money spent on social services, health care and other public programmes benefits their own people. The calculation then is that the more that the government spends on others, the less it spends on its own people.

“While the benefits of US foreign aid may be clear and tangible to economic, military, and/or political elites, they are unlikely to be similarly apparent to the masses, the large majority of whom are only moderately political informed, at best, particularly regarding international politics and global affairs.” - D. Macdonald, ‘Trust in government and American public opinion toward foreign aid’, Political Science Research and Methods, 2025

This cost-benefit analysis becomes particularly salient for voters when they perceive their national economy as struggling. Their own personal financial circumstances, interestingly, does not appear to change the cost-benefit calculation. Nor do moral arguments about helping poor countries seem to change the calculation. A key driver seems to be the extent to which the public does or does not trust their government, since they are relying on their government, and the elites who run them, to make ‘good’ trade offs about domestic and international spending.

While this does not bode well in the current context where many donor countries are facing economic pressures and low levels of trust in government, another study of international assistance during Covid demonstrates that there are ways to overcome these challenges. While the us vs. them cost-benefit analysis was clearly evident across many Western electorates during Covid, the UK and German governments managed effectively convinced the public of the need to spend money on supporting pandemic interventions abroad by explicitly messaging that helping African countries address the pandemic would prevent a second wave from returning to their own countries and thereby create public health benefits at home. In contrast,

“messages that convey anticipated detrimental health consequences in developing countries barely move aid support.” - Y. Kobayashi et al., ‘Public support for development aid during the Covid-19 pandemic’, World Development, 2021

Ways to overcome the transparency challenges

Together these studies provide a more nuanced picture of what kind of transparency the UN should be pursuing and new techniques to effectively share information on its work in a way that increased public support and trust in the UN and multilateral cooperation. None of what the UN is doing in terms of transparency is wrong and it should continue to maintain and strengthen existing efforts. But transparency needs to be understood as more than a technical exercise aimed primarily at convincing member states. Member states are an important receiver of transparency information, but not necessarily an effective mediator based on past practices and the current state of aid budgets in many donor countries.

Accordingly, as a first step, UN practitioners need to consider their target audience, i.e. whether they are mediators, or public receivers of information and tailored their communications accordingly. Annual reports contain a wealth of useful and relevant information on how money has been spent, the beneficiaries reached and outputs and outcomes. They work well with member states and Executive Board members, but may not always be relevant for the public at large, who may be overwhelmed and skeptical of some of the large numbers of beneficiaries served and funds received and spent. Translating these into more relatable data points for the public, such as the cost per meal provided, like WFP has done in the past, not only helps the public but can also help mediators in member state governments as well as journalists and other commentators to translate information appropriately.

In the current era of distrust of public institutions, UN practitioners should also actively expand their communications not only to different types of mediators but to the public at large. As a recent IPI article summarizing research on trust in the UN highlighted, while some politicians and members of government have increasingly voiced their distrust of the UN in recent years, public opinion surveys (predominantly held in Western countries) do not indicate a significant decline in trust in the UN. Practitioners and communications teams need to leverage that and show how countries are benefiting from how the UN is working and spending their money. Such messages need to address the binary cost-benefit analysis, and go beyond just showing how many people have been helped with limited funding. For example, with many countries increasing their spending to prevent irregular migration, one could compare the costs of creating peaceful conditions and facilitating voluntary returns with national spending. In 2024, member states pooled their funds to maintain 11 peacekeeping operations at a total cost of US$5.6 billion, with the UN Mission in South Sudan creating conditions that allowed half a million South Sudanese refugees to return home voluntarily. In that same year, the United States alone (under Biden, not Trump) spent six times more than its assessed contribution to all UN peacekeeping operations to detain and deport about 271,000 migrants.

Finally, UN leadership needs to be more proactive in communicating the UN’s transparency practices and the multitude of governance processes that reinforce that transparency, in addition to sharing actual transparency information. When I asked ChatGPT, for instance to give me examples of how the UN is publicizing its transparency reforms, it comes up with a surprisingly impressive list of different websites that contain transparency information, including the Transparency Gateway, CEB data on staffing and funding, the online repository of OIOS investigation reports and more. Yet it couldn’t provide a clear summary of all the UN’s organizational practices on transparency. Our new ReformNavigator prototype, in contrast was able to find such descriptions of transparency reforms, but only in a multitude of accountability reports to the Fifth Committee. And while it’s important for Fifth Committee delegates to have and review that information regularly, the public (and even most mediators) are not going to search for and read those reports and become convinced that the UN is transparent.

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