UN80: What makes a UN Mandate Effective or Efficient?

3 August 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

Insights from the UN80 Mandate Implementation Review and its predecessors.

Last week, the UN Secretary-General published his Report of the Mandate Implementation Review as part of the second workstream of UN80. Through the use of AI tools, the report provides unique insights into some key overall trends in how mandates have evolved in the UN. The report indicates, for instance, that “Resolutions requiring implementation ‘within existing resources’ are over four times more prevalent today than they were in 2000” (pg. 15), providing an interesting quantitative perspective on how much UN staff have been forced to ‘do more with less’ over the last 25 years.

While such insights are new, the overall challenges related to mandates and the proposed solutions it presents are not very different from similar exercises in the past. Despite the report’s assertion that it “takes a markedly different approach from previous efforts, which may open a way forward”, it focuses primarily on process-related issues that were for the most part outlined in the analysis to facilitate the review of mandates in 2006 (A/60/733). These process issues are not irrelevant - the lack of mandate registries which limit the ability of delegates and staff to confirm when similar mandates already exist, overlaps across mandating bodies, proliferation of reports, poor coordination across implementing entities and a mismatch between expectations and funding - are all real problems that can and should be addressed. But they were raised in the previous exercises in 2006 and even in 1954. And while those processes saw some improvements, they did not fundamentally solve the problems, leading these challenges to crop up again. More importantly, the incremental improvements that can be achieved through the proposed process changes, will not be sufficient for the UN to weather the current financial crisis.

To facilitate the level of reprioritization and rationalization of mandates needed for the UN to focus on what it can deliver effectively within its now very limited resources, the report needed to do what the drafters of the 2006 report realized they couldn’t, and pushed on to member states:

“In the course of preparing this analysis it has become apparent that, if Member

States are to conduct a proper and fully comprehensive review, they will need the

tools and information to enable them to serve as better custodians of their mandates,

and to analyse the effectiveness of those mandates and how they contribute to the

achievement of the overall priorities of the Organization.” - para. 16, A/60/733

As a delegate who was also involved in the 2006 review recently highlighted a ‘new way forward’ can only be found with some kind of agreed criteria about what makes a mandate effective or efficient. Our spotlight this month provides some concrete proposals for such criteria.

One initial criteria, particularly for an organization like the Secretariat with assessed funding, is related to the growth in language around working ‘within existing resources’. If agreement on a mandate or resolution can only be achieved by inserting this language, then it would seem to imply that member states are willing to agree as long as they don’t need to pay any extra for it. That seems like a pretty thin level of consensus. Agreement on this basis may reflect that the mandate has been pushed by a particular group of member states, or potentially UN staff themselves, who want to be tasked accordingly. There may be good reasons for why these stakeholders feel the mandate is important, but should such a frail consensus take precedence over those with a consensus strong enough for member states to open their coffers and pay for it? Probably not.

That said, both the current and 2006 mandate review reports highlight the tendency for many member state bodies to repeatedly adopt similar text on recurring issues without making changes to contextualize them to new events or because nothing new has happened since the last discussion. It is therefore distinctly possible that member states are paying assessed funding for mandates which are no longer relevant or could be eliminated, thereby creating cost savings or allowing the addition of new tasks that can actually be achieved within existing resources. In 2006, the SG indicated that in the mandate registry created at that time, he would have programme managers indicate whether the mandate had been fully implemented (implying it could be terminated) or whether it was still in progress. Clearly that didn’t work, because as the current Mandate Implementation Report highlights:

“more than 85 per cent of active mandates lack instructions on review or termination. In addition, the Secretary-General has not frequently used the existing authority to propose to the General Assembly a list of deliverables for termination.” - Mandate Implementation Review, pg. 29

The related recommendations in the current Mandate Implementation Review, which are much stronger than in the 2006 review, to introduce more collective mandate review processes, strengthen those mechanisms where they exist and systematically include sunset clauses in resolutions are both realistic and practical solutions that have proven to be effective when they exist. The five year Peacebuilding Architecture Reviews, for instance, have managed to enhance the effectiveness of the Peacebuilding Architecture to the point where the Fifth Committee agreed by consensus to provide $50 million of assessed funding annually.

As the Peacebuilding Architecture Reviews have illustrated, these processes are also an opportunity to obtain feedback from communities and stakeholders who are engaging with the UN’s programme implementation. These diverse perspectives on what is working or not and where the UN is needed most can help inform both programme managers and member state decision-makers about what elements of a mandate may have outlived their usefulness or and where changes or even termination may make sense. The key for this to work is for the review to be publicly scheduled well in advance with clear information on timelines for consultations, inputs and decision-making so that all actors can properly prepare and engage with the process. Although such broadly inclusive and participatory processes can be more complex to manage, research shows that such participation has positive effects on the effectiveness of international organizations (see for instance R. Lall, “Making Global Governance Accountable: Civil Society, States, and the Politics of Reform”, American Journal of Political Science, 2023).

Accordingly, another criteria for member states to use in determining whether a mandate is effective, is whether there is resistance to setting up such reviews with stakeholder participation, or a lack of engagement by stakeholders in those reviews. If the UN is delivering effectively, then there should be a critical mass of stakeholders willing to invest in the process and a desire on the part of programme managers and member state decision makers to hear from them about how they are benefiting from the UN and what shortcomings should be addressed. If such engagement is absent, or there are programme managers or member states resistant to such a review, it should call into question whether the mandate is really effective.

Finally, a third criteria that can be used to determine efficiencies is related to the question of coordination. The mandate reviews, and probably every UN reform effort ever undertaken has highlighted the need for improved coordination across the system to ensure coherence and eliminate duplication and redundancies. While there are improvements after each reform effort, the problem remains unresolved to anyone’s satisfaction. And therefore it may be time to count the resources dedicated to coordination and compare those to the resources invested in programme implementation.

According to a very interesting graph on page 26 of the current Mandate Implementation Review, just four entities usually account for 80% of the spending on each SDG - yet, most SDGs have at least 10 entities implementing them. In the most extreme case of SDG 16, there are 23 implementing entities in the UN with only 3 of them accounting for 80% of expenditures. This begs the question, how much of that funding for SDG 16 is being spent on coordinating all 23 entities. If the number of staff (and their levels) that the UN system needs to coordinate its efforts are similar to the numbers of staff responsible for programme implementation in an entity, is it really efficient for that entity to be involved in implementation at all? In such cases, it would seem that moving those programme resources from smaller entities to the biggest spenders with a corresponding reduction in coordination expenditures would provide the UN and member states a better return on investment.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of criteria to determine effectiveness or efficiency of mandates, but it provides a starting point for potential discussions amongst member states about how to organize an intergovernmental review process that provides a genuinely new way forward. Any way forward for the UN has to be based on a strong consensus for what it should be delivering, and that can be measured to a large extent by the willingness of the full membership to pay for such a mandate. Both member states and UN programme managers should want those programmes to deliver tangible results for the communities they serve, and should therefore be willing and able to manage regular and inclusive mandate reviews every five years or so, as the Peacebuilding Architecture is already doing. And while there is a definite need for a broader definition of efficiency for use across the UN system, as suggested by the clusters involved in workstream 3 in the June briefing on UN80, this will take time to elaborate. In the meantime, a starting point is to compare the proportion of coordination and programme implementation resources and ensure the ratio prioritizes delivery over coordination.

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