Will the UN Ever Learn to Reform?

11 May 2025

By Katja Hemmerich

When UN Secretary-General (SG) Antonio Guterres was first appointed, he ushered in significant reforms across the development, peace and security and management pillars of the organization. Among other things, the reforms ‘reinvigorated’ the Resident Coordinator system for greater coordination and coherence amongst UN development organizations, and they emphasized the importance of transparency, accountability and organizational learning to enhance performance and responsiveness. Now the SG’s second term is coming to an end, and an unprecedented shift in the political and funding landscape, has led to the UN80 initiative to identify further efficiencies, review mandates and consider further structural changes.

Over the last few weeks, the SG’s update on the update on the system-wide implementation of the quadrennial comprehensive policy review for development (QCPR) cites a synthesis evaluation by the newly established UN System Wide Evaluation Office that determined that “the establishment of a reinvigorated coordination system for development was essential to enable a more impactful and cohesive UN development system” (A/80/74). Yet, shortly thereafter, a leaked list of suggestions for the UN80 initiative appears to propose eliminating most Resident Coordinators (RCs), and shifting to a system of rotational leadership amongst UN country team heads. So are RC’s (whose role is also a product of previous reforms) really strengthening the UN, or does their limited added value mean they can be eliminated? It’s hard to understand.

The fundamentally contradictory positions within UN leadership seem hard to reconcile. According to Fox News, it’s a reflection of “panic” in the UN as a result of US funding reductions. For many staff, who are already cynical about reform and organizational learning, it will likely reinforce fears that leadership is unable to navigate these challenging times. For leaders, the leak and its consequences will it likely validate the need to keep internal discussions within small high level groups to prevent further leaks or internal criticism from being made public. New research highlights that these are entirely normal reactions for an international organization - and, precisely why the UN struggles to learn and reform effectively. Our spotlight explores why the UN reacts this way, and outlines options to change these dynamics so it can learn and use this reform process for sustainable change.

Why the UN can’t learn

You don’t need to be an organizational design expert to understand that for an organization to improve, it needs to be able to identify mistakes or poor performance and learn from that. The UN system has long recognized this and strengthened its investment in a learning architecture that consists of evaluation and oversight capacities as well as best practices focal points and offices. The aim of these efforts is for the UN to identify problems in a timely manner so they can be corrected, as well identify what is working well to build and share those lessons across the system. The larger political purpose is to be able to demonstrate to member states and donors that the UN is continually improving its performance and thereby strengthen trust in the UN, in particular of donor countries.

Yet a growing body of research is highlighting that this is not working on multiple levels. Despite an increase and strengthening of internal oversight, evaluation and audit functions across the UN system, many donor countries do not always trust these sufficiently to eschew running their own assessments of programmes. This was highlighted by a 2020 Independent Review of of Individual Donor Assessments in Humanitarian Operations, which noted that individual donor assessments doubled between 2016 and 2019 despite a 2016 commitment to reduce their individual assessments. The same Independent Review  noted that individual donor assessments were driven by “a growing domestic skepticism about multilateral action” across key donor countries. And yet, there seems to have been little anticipation of the hollowing out of UN funding across donor countries that we have seen over the last year.

A more recent academic analysis explores the reasons why the UN struggles to learn as an organization. Dr. Ben Christian’s examination of the UN’s peace and security pillar highlights that despite a highly professionalized learning architecture, failures are often not articulated in learning products or glossed over as they move up through the organizational hierarchy. This leads to staff skepticism about the value of the learning products and they are not consistently consulted or used in policy and decision-making processes, which themselves are reflective of an organizational culture that avoids and sometimes even represses internal criticism. This leads to a vicious cycle that in the end undermines efforts to improve performance and reform effectively:

“a repressive and self-restrained criticism culture can prevent an [international organization’s] IO’s formal learning infrastructure from being effective. If staff members do not dare to voice criticism in official formats and critical information is glossed over as it moves up the ranks, the official learning infrastructure suffers from selective input and output—and IOs lack a necessary stimulus for organizational learning. This can lead to performance problems because mistakes are repeated and underlying political assumptions are not adequately reflected in internal decision-making processes” - B. Christian, Why International Organizations Don’t Learn: Dissent Suppression as a Source of IO Dysfunction (2025)

It’s a consequence of structure more than leadership

Dr. Christian is quick to point out that this criticism culture is not unique to peacekeeping and exists across the UN system in varying degrees. So it will likely not be a huge surprise for many working in the UN, many of whom, like myself will assume that the criticism culture is a result of leadership. But Dr. Christian argues that it’s less about leadership and more about the intergovernmental structure of the UN that leads to a culture that suppresses criticism. For one thing, in highly political environments where mandates, priorities and funds are ultimately decided by diverse groupings of member states, uncontrolled information, especially about failures or dissenting views can be dangerous. The Fox News headline about panic in the UN about possible UN cuts is a case in point. It’s hard to negotiate a consensus with 193 countries on UN80, when news media claims you are panicking.

Internal criticism is more than a threat to leadership, it is a potentially threat to the survival of intergovernmental organizations. Reporting on failures can result in an immediate loss of funding and a long term loss of trust, both of which are fundamental for the UN’s ability to deliver. But more than that, Dr. Christian points out that internal criticism risks exposing and undermining a certain ‘organizational hypocrisy’ that the UN actually needs to survive.

This organizational hypocrisy is the glue that allows the UN to reconcile what the UN Charter says it should be doing, with the daily political reality of what member states are willing to agree that it can do. At the highest level, we see examples of this on a regular basis when the Security Council is unable or unwilling to prevent and resolve conflict as per the Charter so the UN provides expensive and unsustainable humanitarian assistance to those affected by conflict. These contradictions and disconnects trickle down throughout the organization, and criticism risks undermining the limited political compromise that exists as well as confidence in the operations that, while imperfect, mitigate the situation. Organizational learning entities need to navigate this tightrope with each after action review, audit or evaluation, and it is not easy.

UN leadership also needs to navigate this tightrope, which explains the seemingly contradictory positions on the RC system for instance. Fundamentally reforming or restructuring the organization on the basis of actions by one member state will not fly with the overall membership - a point learned the hard way by Kofi Annan when the US similarly tried to exert undue influence on his reform agenda. And the Global South has made it clear that achieving Agenda 2030 is a key priority for them, a key consideration that guides QCPR updates and the need to demonstrate progress in achieving development reforms (which 33 separate evaluations seem to indicate the RCs are doing). Yet, massive funding shortfall which is only going to get worse, means something has to give - which means UN leadership will need to consider solutions that appear contradictory to previous approaches. And this in turn, makes staff, who see these contradictions firsthand, more cynical and resistant to change, and leadership more reluctant to engage in critical internal discussions of problems and potential solutions.

How the UN can Learn to Reform

The irony is that this vicious cycle, which is meant to protect the organization, unfortunately undermines its performance and its ability to change and reform. All of the additional oversight and learning mechanisms that have been added and strengthened by the UN and donor countries have added layers of bureaucracy to the system, and cost at least $100 million a year (this is a rough estimate based on the budgets of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the Joint Inspection Unit, the Board of Auditors and the UN Evaluation Group without counting the budgets of individual evaluation or learning and audit functions in agencies, funds and programmes or departments). Similar cost-benefit analysis of other typical ‘management reforms’ like increasing monitoring and reporting mechanisms, also highlight negative trade-offs. As Dr. Dan Honig demonstrated in his 2019 study, performance reporting and tighter controls on field operations, although always costly, can be helpful in predictable or routine environments. But in volatile contexts like the conflict or humanitarian situations that much of the UN is engaged in, such mechanisms limit the ability of field operations to adapt and react to the changing context, thereby reducing performance. And none of this seems to have enhanced the trust of member states or their citizens’ trust in the UN.

“For some tasks, in some environments, it is not just that the monitoring is costly—the monitoring itself may have deleterious effects. If indeed it is true that tight oversight is detrimental to performance in some circumstances, public accountability as conventionally conceived may sometimes come at the expense of desired performance outcomes. Reporting may be a façade, with reporting requirements inducing agents to produce numbers at the expense of actually forwarding the broader goals of their organizations.” - D. Honig, ‘When Reporting Undermines Performance: The Costs of Politically Constrained Organizational Autonomy in Foreign Aid Implementation’ (2019)

There is therefore both a need and an important window of opportunity for the UN to learn from these past management reform efforts and try new, cheaper and more effective solutions going forward. In some cases totally new solutions are needed, and internal discussions with staff can be an important source of innovation. In other cases, UN reformers should be looking at tools used by other multilateral organizations. Research has also demonstrated that community complaints mechanisms that exist in virtually all multilateral development banks have measurable positive impacts on accountability and performance, including by allowing for correction of problems in the planning or initial phases of programmes (long before formative evaluations would catch them). Moreover, these mechanisms are respected by member states and legislative bodies, who generally fall in line with the policy recommendations arising from such complaints mechanisms. A study of the World Bank’s Inspection Panel found that:

“It has reduced errors and at times corruption within Bank management, and made it harder to conduct shoddy analysis or rush projects to meet deadlines and lending targets. Transparency from the IP has facilitated the involvement of displaced and indigenous communities in WB policymaking through formal Action Plans, and functionally made the WB more accountable to the lives of those affected by projects.” - B. Sovacool, ‘Cooperative or Inoperative? Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank’s Inspection Panel’, 2017

UNDP and its Executive Board have already created such a mechanism to help enforce its social and environmental standards, making it easy to replicate elsewhere in the UN system. Donor countries, by setting up and sustaining the Multilateral Organization Performance Assessment Network, have demonstrated that they are more likely to trust independent evaluation and learning organizations. So rather than duplicating them, perhaps there should be consideration of how to use independent think tanks, universities and MOPAN through systematic outsourcing. Not only is it potentially cheaper and more trusted, but it would allow the system to benefit from these external organizations’ ability to voice criticism in a way that is hard for internal mechanisms. The internal learning architecture should be refocused on the more complex but valuable task of ensuring that evaluation findings are implemented.

There are likely a lot more ideas out there. To support critical reform discourse, ReformWorks invites all who are working with and for the UN to join us in an interactive online dialogue on 30 May at 9:00 EST/15:00 CET with Dr. Ben Christian about “Why the UN Doesn’t Learn, and What This Means in an Era of Reform”. In recognition of the sensitive nature of criticism of these issues, all participants will be asked to adhere to Chatham House rules for this online dialogue.

Click here to learn more and register.