If there’s no trust, how can the UN transform?
September 2026
By Katja Hemmerich
The 81st session of the UN General Assembly was formally opened on 8 September, as the role of President of the General Assembly (PGA) was transferred from Germany to Bangladesh’s Khalilur Rahman. The new PGA’s opening address, and the subsequent last opening address of Secretary-General (SG) Antonio Guterres, provided somewhat competing analyses of the current challenges facing multilateralism and how the UN should navigate them, in keeping with this year’s theme: “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations that Delivers for All”. These differences raise questions about the extent to which transformation is actually possible as divisions between member states grow and the legitimacy of multilateralism is increasingly being questioned.
The SG’s analysis notes that states are increasingly flouting the rules of the multilateral system, which makes it difficult for international organizations to meet the moment, as geopolitical mistrust blocks agreement on the effective reforms needed to restore people’s faith in multilateralism. In this view, there is not much the UN can do to change or address current global challenges until member states return to the rules-based international order, and are able to agree on what they want the UN to do - a theme that is also evident in the recently published UN Peace Operations Review. The fundamental premise underlying this perspective is that international organizations and collective action only works when they are accorded legitimacy, or trusted, by their stakeholders, whose goodwill is required for implementation in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. But the PGA’s take is that both multilateralism and the UN need to change together to meet the moment, with trust in the UN being rebuilt as it demonstrates that it can deliver both for member states and the global public. There is an implicit acceptance that the multilateralism and the UN no longer enjoy the legitimacy they once did, and that this needs to be rebuilt through adaptation and delivery of results for two disparate and broad audiences.
The PGA’s vision is less defeatist than that of the SG, and portrays a world where constructive change and a return to some form of an effective multilateral system is possible - if the UN can deliver. But is that delivery even possible if the UN’s legitimacy is declining? We explore this question, and how UN staff and delegates will need to engage with reform during the 81st session of the General Assembly in this month’s spotlight.
Are Trust and Legitimacy Required for the UN to Demonstrate Effectiveness?
Both scholars and practitioners working on and with international organizations recognize that most international organizations do not have enforcement mechanisms and are therefore dependent buy-in from their member states and other stakeholders to implement their mandates. This can include actions as complex as member states incorporating internationally agreed standards into their own legislation, or as simple as according UN staff visas to be able to work in their countries or engage with local actors. Traditional wisdom is that this buy-in comes when decisions, programmes and the institution itself are considered legitimate - a key reason why consensus-based decision-making dominates in international organizations. The implication is that international organizations can never have too much legitimacy, and the greater their legitimacy, the greater their effectiveness.
But two Swedish scholars have recently called this into question, arguing that any political institution can have too much legitimacy, which in turn creates complacency, thereby undermining its effectiveness and its ability to adapt. They validate their argument through a case study of the first fifteen years of the African Union, which enjoyed extremely high levels of legitimacy in the early years, but lacked effectiveness, which led to a loss of legitimacy that spurred reforms that increased its effectiveness in the late 2010s. Their study includes a great quote from a high level official in the AU’s Institutional Reforms Unit:
“Everything that matters is performance and delivery… and legitimacy is not helping us to achieve this….Look at the IMF or the World Bank, they are highly effective organizations but they are not legitimate….This shows that legitimacy means ineffectiveness, and that legitimacy is not needed for an effective organization.” - Cited in H. Agné & F. Söderbaum, “The Costs of Legitimacy for Political Institutions”, 2022
What the case study highlights is that in the early years, when the AU’s legitimacy was high, there were a lot of high level conferences committing the AU to carry out collective action, while member states, the African public and civil society, as well as donors failed to see this materialize into tangible results. The increasing disconnect between the rhetoric and reality eroded stakeholders trust and ultimately the organization’s legitimacy. It was this lack of legitimacy and results that was called out publicly by several African leaders, including Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who was then elected as head of the AU and led its member states to agree to a series of effective reforms in 2016-17 focused on implementation and performance.
The new PGA’s vision and his focus on delivery as a means of rebuilding trust and legitimacy is very much aligned to this case study. And interestingly, he also explicitly calls out the problem of complacency and a lack of genuine criticism in allowing the UN to adapt to the new global reality:
“The achievements of the United Nations should not be an excuse for complacency, nor should it’s shortcomings obscure how essential it remains… We must continually examine our work with honesty and humility, unhesitatingly identify the deficiencies, and relentlessly work together to enhance our capacity and efficiency so that our organization is able to credibly respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.” - Opening address of the 81st session of the General Assembly, 8 Sept. 2026
Effecting Change in the Face of Declining Legitimacy
Legitimacy, and past achievements, are therefore not always assets when change is needed, and a loss of legitimacy and trust can be a tool to push political institutions and their very diverse stakeholders to change. But how exactly does this happen? We see two concrete implications of the PGA’s vision for change for delegates, UN staff and how the reform process needs to evolve.
First, if, as posited by Drs. Agné and Söderbaum, the high levels of legitimacy accorded to the old rules-based order also had negative impacts in the form of complacency, then it’s ok not to defend that old order at all costs. Contestation of the old order and its norms is therefore not inherently bad, and there is room for dialogue with those who contest it. As one of our guest contributors last year, Andraž Melanšek, outlined, contestation of norms is a healthy part of their evolution:
“recent findings in norm research show that such contestation is not necessarily a sign of failure. Rather, it is an essential part of how norms evolve. Their meaning and application are constantly debated, questioned, and interpreted differently by various actors. Even when there is broad agreement on a principle, such as the protection of civilians, there is often disagreement about what it entails in practice: who should be protected, by whom, and under what conditions. These disagreements are not just noise; they are the mechanism through which norms remain dynamic and relevant.” - A. Melanšek, UN80: Beyond Mere Technocratic Solutions, 2025
For this debate and adaptation of norms to be constructive, there needs to be a recognition at all levels that these are inherently political debates, and they need to be fed with the appropriate information, analysis and context, which goes beyond the purely technocratic approach that has defined reform processes over the last decade. An example of this would be, for instance, to address the question of stabilization mandates in the Peace Operations Review. The mandating of UN peacekeeping forces to carry out operations with local security forces to stabilize areas, sometimes in the absence of a viable peace process, has put pressure on the principles of peacekeeping (consent of the parties, impartiality and use of force in self-defence and defence of the mandate), leading in some cases to adaptations of how they are implemented on the ground. There are political reasons why these mandates have come about, and there are political (and operational) consequences of this type of engagement by the UN on countries hosting peacekeeping operations that should be explored and debated to update or reinforce those fundamental norms of peacekeeping to ensure they are fit for the future. Yet, although the High Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations in 2015, the 2017 ‘Santos Cruz report’ on Improving the Security of Peacekeepers, OIOS evaluations of MINUSMA (A/76/698) and MONUSCO (IED-24-024), as well as numerous academic and thinktank publications that have flagged the need to revisit these norms as contexts and mandates change, this is absent from the Peace Operations Review report. It’s as if raising questions on the principles of peacekeeping would undermine their legitimacy. Yet this complacency means that stakeholders lack direct information from the UN’s own operations and experience on the challenges facing peacekeepers in adhering to those principles and the negative and positive implications of evolutions that are already happening.
This in turn highlights to the second implication of the PGA’s vision for change, which is that reform processes need to be designed in a way to facilitate such comprehensive and critical political analysis. In a highly political organization like the UN that depends on the goodwill of its member states for its mandates and funding, critiques of the organization’s effectiveness or of member state actions, create risks. But it is precisely that critique that drives change in organization - and why reform processes need to bring in informed and independent perspectives and actors.
When Kofi Annan was Secretary-General, he did this very effectively through the use of independent panels, made up of a mix of former UN staff, member state representatives and occasionally think tanks or outside experts familiar with the issue and the UN. These panels provided a critical analysis of a challenge and how the UN as an organization and its member states were addressing it with related reform proposals, that were presented to the SG and member states simultaneously. This meant that member states and UN leadership could accept or reject proposals without it leading to a perception that UN leadership and member states were in disagreement. More importantly, the often slow process of having panels consult and develop proposals, followed by review and debate amongst member states and within UN leadership allowed for an understanding of areas of mutual agreement and red lines from key stakeholders, paving the way for the SG to formally propose what reforms he wanted to implement based on a strong understanding of what would gain consensus agreement in the General Assembly.
This is an inherently different approach to that of Secretary-General Guterres, who tends to put forward his preferred proposal. This approach has often led member states to feel they have insufficient information, and in turn led to non-action when member states have reservations, as in the case of the UNDP-UNOPS or UNFPA-UNWomen mergers, or a begrudging approval of the UNITAR-UNSSC merger despite member states misgivings - all of which leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and doesn’t foster the trust that further collective problem-solving requires. For those designing and leading reform processes during this General Assembly and the tenure of the next SG, therefore, it would be useful to consider how to formally build in broader independent perspectives and critiques into reform reports and discussions while creating the time and space decision-makers to engage with the information and each other on areas of mutual agreement and their respective red lines.
Inevitably change will be difficult, and there will never be a perfect reform process. But the new PGA does appear to have charted a vision for the way forward that, based on the evidence, could work.
