National Staff: The Underestimated Strategic Asset for UN Reform

13 April 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

As the international humanitarian and development aid system tries to cope with the current funding crisis, I have seen a growing number of discussions highlighting that this could be an opportunity to really operationalize ‘localization’ strategies. One particularly provocative post on LinkedIn suggested nationalizing all P-1, P-2 and P-3 posts in field offices of international organizations. But would this really work, and is it as simple as changing the classification of posts from international to national?

I’ve curated the research to answer this question for this month’s ReformWorks spotlight. In short, there is significant evidence that national staff are an under-utilized strategic asset that should be part of current UN reform discussions. National Professional Officers (NPOs) can improve performance while creating cost-efficiencies for the UN, if they are used strategically. But that can only be achieved through organizational culture change that genuinely values and engages with the perspectives of national staff, rather than perceiving them solely as cheap labour. Examination of the evidence from the UN system highlights that this is not yet happening at the scale needed for the UN to reap the performance benefits that NPOs offer. This article outlines why and what is needed to modernize UN staffing models, while providing concrete tips for international staff to initiate the necessary culture change.

Does the mere existence of national staff lead to localization?

The underlying assumption of the provocative LinkedIn post I mentioned is that national staff, simply through their existence will help facilitate localization or at least greater local sensitivity in approaches. But research shows that this is about more than just staffing numbers. To be able inject local perspectives into decision-making, there needs to be institutional space and acceptance for national staff to influence policies, strategies and decision-making. A 2019 study of national staff influence on peace operations by the UN, the European Union and the Organizations for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) highlighted that there are structural barriers to national staff influence in different international organizations. These differences mean that:

“there are significant opportunities for local staff in the OSCE, and more moderate opportunities in the UN, to feed local information into policy implementation processes. By contrast, the scope for such information linkage is significantly narrower in EU missions.” - S. Eckhard, “Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff: Contestation from within?” (2019)

A key structural issue is the extent to which international organizations have policies that restrict or allow national staff to carry out substantive or managerial tasks. The OSCE has no restrictions on locally-recruited staff carrying out substantive tasks or managerial/supervisory functions, as opposed to the EU, which prohibits both. The UN allows National Professional Officer to carry out substantive tasks and take on supervisory and managerial roles. As Prof. Echkard notes, it is the broader roles for national staff in the OSCE, coupled with organizational intention to use national staff strategically, for instance as the backbone of their approach to withdrawing peace missions that facilitates national staff influence and numbers. 75% of OSCE mission staff between 2004 and 2015 were local staff, as compared to 34% of EU missions (deployed between 2006 and 2016) and 58% of UN peacekeeping missions deployed between 2000 and 2016.

Accordingly, numbers of national staff alone don’t lead to localization, nor are there significant numbers of national staff in an international organization if their roles are restricted. The dynamics of how national staff contribute to localization and performance of an international organization is more nuanced, even in cases when policies do not explicitly restrict their roles. As a researcher at the University of Ottawa highlighted in his analysis of how expertise is valued in the international humanitarian system:

“local professionals are valued for the field-level knowledge that they possess, but it does not necessarily translate to them being trusted with making administrative decisions based on their local knowledge to anchor the future trajectories of their organizations.” - J. Bian, "The racialization of expertise and professional non-equivalence in the humanitarian workplace", (2022)

National staff as a strategic asset for UN reform

Back in 2017, the UN Human Resources Network recognized the strategic value of National Professional Officers, who at the time advocated for the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC) to reduce the restrictions on where and how UN entities could use NPOs. When the NPO staff category was originally created in the 1980s, it was intended to help build national capacities in UN programme countries and NPOs were therefore restricted to working only on ‘national issues’ and not international ones. HR practitioners advocated for loosening this restriction in 2017 when the ICSC reviewed the NPO staff category so that they could use them more strategically both for cost efficiencies and improved performance. NPOs were already being I used in regional shared service centers and thereby working on processes beyond their home countries, in violation of the requirement to work only on national issues. The HR Network also considered NPOs as having a ‘pivotal’ role in advancing the 2030 Agenda, presumably in the context of broader localization debates. As a result, the ICSC agreed to allow UN entities greater flexibility in using NPOs, and created even more institutional space for them to influence UN programming and approaches.

However, there is little evidence that the UN has systemically embraced the strategic opportunities that human resources practitioners perceived for the NPO category, either in terms of numbers of staff or their contribution to decision-making. As the staffing data in the graph illustrates, only a few entities like UNWomen, which is undergoing a pivot to the field, shifted the majority of their professional workforce from international to national professional staff between 2017 and 2023. UNICEF and WFP had already had a majority of NPOs and have increased that proportion a bit more since 2017. But other UN entities continue to maintain a majority of international professionals with the UN Secretariat (UN in the graph) and WHO seeing a slight decline in the proportion of NPOs amongst their professional workforce.

Additional barriers to strategic use of NPOs

As indicated earlier, strategic usage of NPOs is about more than just numbers and policies. The varying approaches to NPOs indicated in the staffing data, the ICSC debates and external research all indicate that there are additional factors that need to be considered in relation to organizational independence, responsible staffing practices and organizational culture. For example, the ICSC maintained restrictions on the use of NPOs at headquarters and the ability to move them across countries for long-term assignments because they were legitimately concerned that the former would skew the UN’s geographic balance, and the latter would incentivize the use of NPOs as a potentially exploitative cheap labour alternative to international staff. These continue to be legitimate concerns that need to be considered in future staffing reforms, and both member states and HR practitioners might want to consider monitoring and sharing more data on NPOs specifically, in recognition of the old adage that “we value what we count”.

Another legitimate factor that needs to be considered when determining whether staff profiles should be International or national is the risk related to organizational impartiality and independence that national staff may bring because of their own biases or because they are more exposed to potential corruption or co-optation in some countries due to the context and their lower salaries. Professor Eckhard highlights various case studies to illustrate how this can potentially undermine UN performance and credibility:

“one case study on the UN interim administration mission in Kosovo found that the mission failed to implement affirmative policies benefiting the (now) Serb minority because its interim administration predominantly employed local ethnic Albanian civil servants who opposed delivering benefits to their former ‘oppressors’. Single case studies on foreign aid indicate that local capture is also a relevant problem there and case studies on humanitarian assistance demonstrate how local elites can capture the delivery of international aid to serve their own political interests.” - S. Eckhard, “Comparing how peace operations enable or restrict the influence of national staff: Contestation from within?” (2019)

But more systemic quantitative studies highlight that this risks may be overestimated in some contexts, thereby undermining the additional performance benefits that national perspectives can also bring to international organizations. A 2021 study of 50,000 World Bank procurement decisions across 1729 projects found that it was the procurement led by internationals - not nationals - that had a higher prevalence of waivers and exceptions to the process to limit competition. Internationally-led procurement process also tended to reward international suppliers over local suppliers as opposed the procurement processes led by nationals (M. Heinzl, "Divided loyalties? The role of national IO staff in aid-funded procurement" 2022). All of this highlights that national staff can and should be playing an important role in decision-making processes in international organizations, which can support the localization agenda. But we need to have a better understanding of when to prioritize risks related to independence and when to prioritize potential benefits to localization and performance that national staff bring.

Part of the problem may be organizational cultures that value international expertise and perspectives at the expense of national expertise, despite the rhetoric on the importance of local perspectives. Some external researchers like Dr. Bian theorize that this is part due to historical structures and biases that lead us to value 'international' or Western perspectives at the expense of those from the Global South. While internal UN evaluations do not speak to this issue, they do highlight that national staff and their perspectives are not effectively included in decision-making processes where they should be. A 2022 evaluation by WFP of its peace building policy, for example, highlighted this as one of the barriers to implementation of conflict-sensitive approaches that the policy was intended to facilitate. While the policy recognized the importance of a local conflict analysis to inform country office approaches, evaluators noted that national staff, despite having key knowledge of local conflict dynamics, were often not involved in the analysis or ensuing discussions around the programming implications.

Dr. Bian cites a similar example raised during his interviews with a UN staff member:

“All international organizations would develop a country plan to mitigate with new pandemic challenges. However, for us—at least in OCHA’s Damascus capital office—the country plan was developed in a closed-door meeting consisted of only expats. I was a bit shocked; I mean, at least they [the expat management] could have called some of the senior local staff to participate. After all, we have been around much longer than they have. But no, we were not even asked for comments or suggestions. What do they know about our country—where we are born and raised, in a conflict that we live through—that we do not know? Especially when most of them have only arrived several months ago?” - cited in J. Bian, "The racialization of expertise and professional non-equivalence in the humanitarian workplace", (2022)

It’s not just a matter of nationalizing posts

Taken together, there is ample evidence that national staff, in particular National Professional Officers, can underpin new staffing models for international organizations that enhance performance and reduce costs. But this requires much more than just converting international posts to national ones.

Increasing the number of national posts needs to be guided by a sophisticated analysis of the potential risks related to independence - an analysis that needs to be tailored to local political conditions, mandates, and local labour markets rather than just assumptions or lessons from other contexts which may not be comparable. A similarly sophisticated analysis is also need to identify where national staff and specifically NPOs can be used to enhance performance and localization. That analysis then needs to inform job descriptions and managerial processes to ensure that national staff are delegated the appropriate decision-making authorities and involved in relevant analytical, planning and decision-making processes. Research on innovation in the UN highlights for instance that field level innovation is most successful when innovations and their scaling are tailored to local contexts and the needs of beneficiaries - yet how many innovation labs in the UN are staffed by NPOs?

Many readers may be thinking this is something that HR professionals need to sort out. And while HR practitioners do have an important role to play in designing and implementing such improvements to staffing models, all UN international staff can help to change the culture. This is a good time to reflect on how much national staff are included in the strategic discussions and decision-making processes in your own teams. So I leave you with some questions for further thought:

1. Have you sought your national colleagues’ views on current UN reform processes? Have they been included in formal discussions?

2. Do you include NPOs in your management meetings with other professional staff?

3. When was the last time you sought the views of locally-recruited colleagues on a decision for the team?

4. How involved are your national staff in designing and implementing your strategies for localization?

5. How involved are national staff in innovation processes in your team - do they participate in discussions, do they lead them, have they been able to initiate exploration of innovations?