Will Shared Services Really Fix the UN’s Problems?

October 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

As the UN Secretariat issued its revised 2026 programme and budget (A/80/400) this month, we are starting to see how Workstream 1 of the UN80 is evolving. The key premise to creating efficiencies is the consolidation of administrative services. The underlying assumption is that shared services—combined with greater use of technology—will reduce staffing needs while improving service delivery through consistency and standardization. The revised budget claims that these measures will “generate both immediate and long-term financial savings while also delivering qualitative improvements” (para. 14). But will it actually work?

This month’s spotlight explores the evidence from past UN initiatives and evaluations to answer this question. Experience from across the UN system suggests that shared services can only deliver on their promise if they are well-managed, strategically implemented, and guided by performance indicators beyond cost-efficiency. We’ve taken a closer look at the revised budget and programme for 2026 to see if these lessons have been learnt.

What has past experience with UN shared services demonstrated?

Two UN evaluations offer critical insights:

• The 2016 Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) report on administrative support services (JIU/REP/2016/11) found that shared service centers in lower cost duty stations can yield efficiencies—but only when they are not treated as ends in themselves. Success depends on strong leadership, clear performance monitoring, and a benefits tracking strategy. Additionally, planning and implementation of these initiatives need to mitigate the risk of losing institutional knowledge and anticipate an increased workload in relation to coordination between headquarters and service centers.

• A 2018 UNDP evaluation of its inter-agency operational services also revealed mixed results. Many UN entities benefited from cost savings, but satisfaction with service quality varied. Limitations in staffing, outdated IT systems, and a lack of strategic vision for inter-agency service provision undermined performance and client trust.

A particularly salient issue raised by both evaluations is that they caution against overemphasizing cost-efficiency in relation to shared service center strategies. The JIU warns that member states’ fixation on savings can derail effective management, while UNDP notes that cost savings alone are insufficient to sustain client satisfaction or long-term viability. Given the acute liquidity crisis and the simultaneous focus on cost-cutting by the United States, as highlighted in their opening statement to the Fifth Committee, these are serious risks for the Secretariat’s approach and Workstream 1.

Where’s the Strategy?

Despite these lessons, the 2026 budget revisions provides little evidence of an organization-wide strategy for effective implementation of the strategy or mitigation of the risks highlighted from past experience. There is no mention of performance indicators beyond cost, no benefits tracker, and no clear leadership structure to guide implementation. One would like to hope that this is being developed in the background and the lacunae was primarily a function of the tight timeline for the finalization of the budget.

Yet the revised budget document unfortunately presents a somewhat incoherent approach. On the one hand, there does appear to be a larger strategy to the consolidation of Executive Offices in New York, to which the UN80 team has received buy-in from affected departments. On the other hand, the fragmented approach to translation services paints a very different picture. While the introduction references AI tools as a potential efficiency measure specifically for translation (para. 57(b)), the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM)—the business owner for translation—makes no mention of AI for translation. Instead, it proposes by “leveraging the skills of staff to fulfil multiple roles, for example both translation and interpretation” (para. 116 (b)), which sounds a lot like ‘doing more with less’. Meanwhile, the International Trade Centre (ITC), the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (ESCAP) and the Department of Operational Support (DOS) are all going to be testing out AI tools for translation with human supervision (paras. 155(d); 159(b); 166(b)ii.; and 187(b)ii.) with no plan mentioned in relation to capturing that institutional knowledge or ensuring adherence to institutional knowledge. To be fair, translators and interpreters are a significant proportion of the DGACM workforce, and AI is a legitimate threat to their jobs - but here again, there is no indication that leadership is helping DGACM to navigate this extremely sensitive negotiation and the impact on staff.

All of this highlights that - as is so often the case in the UN - the idea may be good, but there is a serious risk of failure because of the lack of a serious implementation strategy. With all of the political and financial pressures on the UN at the moment, it really cannot afford to fail either in terms of the efficiencies or the quality of the services it provides once consolidated. Translation provides another case in point. Case studies of performance of UN organization often highlight that the lack of timely translation of documentation undermines member state trust in the organization and is one of several factors that contribute to a negative cycle of micromanagement and antagonistic interactions that only further undermine performance of the organization. (See for instance V. Jankauskas, "Delegation and Stewardship in International Organizations" (2022) or our related spotlight on trust dynamics between UN staff and member state delegates.)

There is still time to fix it

The Fifth Committee session - even with all its challenges - means there is still a chance for the Secretariat and member states to work together and increase the chances for success of the shared services approach - because despite the gaps, it can certainly help alleviate some of the UN's current challenges. The UN80 team should be working on an implementation strategy - and harness the expertise that exists across the Secretariat (not just its 38th floor) in developing such a plan. The plan, and more importantly the KPIs and the strategy for identifying and tracking benefits needs to balance cost-efficiencies and quality of services.

With respect to the latter, member states will play a key role in the Fifth Committee in ensuring that balance survives as consensus is negotiated on the revised programme and budget and the UN80 initiative more generally. Those member states, who genuinely want to ensure that the UN survives this crisis as the agile, responsive and effective organization as outlined in A/RES/79/318 (para. 2), need to ensure that cost-cutting is not the only criteria against which reforms are measured. This in turn will require political strategies within and across regional groups and by the UN’s leadership as well.

UN leadership also needs to work harder to align approaches across departments. Translation is only one example where departments have approached cost-cutting and efficiencies through technology and process optimization disparately. The incoherence only provides further validation for those who think the UN is too big to manage, or that leadership at various levels are making decisions on the basis of their own self-interest. One way to do that systematically would be to develop some kind of governance structure for UN80 and its workstreams.

Whilst governance structures for reform and change initiatives have typically been perceived by this Secretary-General as overly bureaucratic, they can be a useful tool in aligning leadership and maintaining buy in through reform and change processes and should be considered when developing an implementation strategy workstream 1. Past initiatives like the Global Field Support Strategy for UN peacekeeping with its client and management boards, was able to achieve cost efficiencies and improvements in services. More recent initiatives like UN2.0, which also put forward useful and relevant approaches for change, does not have any governance structure and is struggling to demonstrate real organizational improvements. At a time when the Quintet of Change would really be helpful in addressing the need to cut costs without undermining performance, the revised programme and budget demonstrates primarily lip service to UN2.0 across most departments. After almost five years of implementation, it’s hard to believe that the most common ‘leveraging of technology’ across the Secretariat consists of using virtual meeting tools, cited by 16 entities in the revised budget (and in many cases that is the only way that they indicate they can leverage technology).

More than ever, the UN needs to do the hard work of managing the organization and this challenging change process, and it needs to do that on the basis of evidence of what does and doesn’t work in highly politicized and complex intergovernmental organizations.

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