At the same time, nationalist and populist currents sweeping across  the globe – from the United States and Brazil to India and parts of  Europe – are eroding faith in multilateralism. To be fair, these  movements are not anomalies; they are an expression of widespread  disillusionment. For many, globalisation delivered dislocation rather  than opportunity, and although the doctrine of comparative advantage  continues to hold up as an economic theory, vast segments of society  have been left to absorb the shocks involved in pursuing it. The result  is a backlash against the international system represented by the UN  and a deepening scepticism about the very architecture of global  governance, now seen by many as outdated, out of touch and unnecessarily  costly.

As the UN marks its 80th anniversary it is no longer the anchor of  global stability it aspires to be. Instead, it is struggling to find its  place in a rapidly shifting global order beset with fast-moving global  crises, from climate change to pandemics to geopolitical fragmentation.  With the election of a new UN secretary-general set to take place in  2026, it is time for a bolder conversation about a systemic overhaul  that could restore the UN’s relevance in a fractured, contested and  digitally disrupted world. Current Secretary-General António Guterres  still has the opportunity to move beyond administrative streamlining to  deliver not just a more efficient institution, but a reimagined one.

A history of reform

Morale at the UN is low. This is a product not merely of internal  restructuring and potential lay-offs, but also a sense that the  organisation no longer knows what it’s trying to achieve. Reform is in  the air, and not for the first time. Nearly every secretary-general  since the early 1970s has pursued institutional improvements.

The 1973 oil shock and associated economic woes defined Kurt  Waldheim’s tenure (1972–81). He faced financial constraints, allegations  of a bloated bureaucracy and calls for reforms to the assessed  contributions (that is, the financial contributions) made by the UN  membership. In response, he implemented measures to improve  administrative efficiencies and fiscal responsibility, in addition to  streamlining staff positions. Like Secretary-General Guterres today, he  also froze hiring.

Secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–91) faced a financial  crisis due to non-payment of assessed contributions by the member  states, notably the US, which threatened to withhold 20% of its  contribution until certain reform benchmarks were met, including  progress toward some form of weighted voting on the UN budget. He  undertook budgetary and administrative reforms, enhanced financial  oversight and downsized parts of the organisation. He is known for the  dismissal of several senior officials to streamline the top-heavy UN  Secretariat.

During secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s tenure (1992–96),  the UN had a record $3.8 billion in outstanding assessments and faced  demands from the US not only to aggressively downsize its ‘elephantine’  bureaucracy, but also to get out of the foreign-aid business.  Boutros-Ghali’s ‘Agenda for Peace’ reforms sought to shift the UN’s  focus from reactive conflict response to proactive global-peace  stewardship, with an emphasis on preventive diplomacy, peacemaking,  peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding. Despite the end of the  Cold War, American critics felt that the proposed reforms were  converting the UN into a supranational governance body while failing to  address US concerns about efficiency and bureaucracy reduction.

Boutros-Ghali’s departure after a single term led to the election of  secretary-general Kofi Annan (1997–2006), who inherited the financial  challenges of the Boutros-Ghali era. He attempted at least two rounds  of far-reaching reforms. The first – the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’ –  focused on internal reforms. The second, outlined in the 2005 report  ‘In Larger Freedom’, sought to overhaul the UN across its development,  security and human-rights functions, as well as offering a bold attempt  at Security Council reforms. Annan’s vision for a UN more attuned to  the world it served led to several lasting changes, including the  creation of the Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council; the  launch of the Global Compact, a UN-led voluntary initiative encouraging  businesses to align with UN principles on human rights, labour,  environment and anti-corruption; and the Millennium Development Goals, a  set of eight global-development goals adopted in the year 2000.

Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s tenure (2007–16) overlapped with the  2008 global financial crisis and demands for better service delivery by  the UN. He pursued internal reforms, such as an attempt to build a  coherent UN leadership at the national level, as outlined in the report  ‘Delivering as One’.

Since the start of his own term in 2017, Guterres has often warned  that there is no alternative to reform, recently stating that the UN  faces a choice between ‘reform’ or ‘rupture’. His first attempt at  reform, the UN 2.0 agenda, proposed to transform the UN into an adaptive  institution by enhancing five core capabilities – innovation, digital  transformation, strategic foresight, behavioural science and data  literacy – across all UN operations, but this didn’t succeed as  intended. Now faced with a serious financial crunch, Guterres has  launched the UN80 Initiative, which aims at ‘rapidly identifying  efficiencies and improvements in the way we work’; ‘thoroughly reviewing  the implementation of all mandates given to us by Member States’; and  undertaking a ‘strategic review of deeper, more structural changes and  programme realignment in the UN System’.

Reforming for renewal

Historically, reform efforts at the UN have not lacked ambition or  continuity, and many have improved internal efficiency, departmental  organisation, accountability and professional standards. While  administrative reforms can be beneficial, such changes will not suffice  to resuscitate the UN’s role as an anchor of peace and security or to  reclaim its role as the leader of multilateral, rules-based global  order. The real question is not whether the UN should reform – it must –  but whether it can stop mistaking internal housekeeping for strategic  renewal, with the attendant risk of perfecting the machinery of  irrelevance.

Organisational drift at the UN stems from the misalignment of ongoing  and earlier reforms with the external environment in which the UN  operates, and with the continuous transformation of the UN from a  guarantor of collective security into a vast but loosely coordinated  development apparatus. Today, that diffusion has widened the gap  between the UN’s primary mandate and its newer roles, leaving the  organisation overstretched, fragmented and struggling to respond  coherently to the crises of a more complex, contested and digitally  disrupted world.

Guterres’s proposed reforms are again framed around internal  optimisation, cost-cutting and streamlining. More specifically, they  represent a desire to placate powerful financial contributors,  particularly the United States. While these measures may yield further  operational improvements, they do not address the deeper institutional  drift and legitimacy crisis facing the UN, nor do they adequately  realign the institution with a radically shifting landscape of global  challenges, including artificial intelligence (AI), disinformation,  ecological collapse and multipolar instability.

A genuinely transformative agenda would not start with cost  constraints, but rather focus on a bold reimagining of the UN’s role,  purpose and capabilities. The secretary-general and his team should ask  what the UN is for, what kind of world it is operating within and what  role the UN should play in shaping it. Five transformational shifts are  needed to align the organisation’s internal political arrangements with a  rapidly changing external environment. Firstly, the UN should redefine  its posture by becoming a better convenor and architect of a  pluralistic, rules-based global order. Secondly, it should frame reforms  around its core purpose, prioritising peace and security. Thirdly, it  should shed duplicative roles in development and focus more on  norm-building than implementation. Fourthly, it should confront the  paralysis affecting the Security Council and the General Assembly.  Finally, it should reshape its workforce into a mission-based, modular  ‘talent cloud’ aligned with the skill sets needed to meet the challenges  of the twenty-first century.

A better convenor

While some past reforms did focus on using the UN’s convening power  to engage actors other than its sovereign membership, states have  remained the predominant actors in the UN’s decision-making. In a world  where non-state actors play an outsized role in shaping people’s daily  lives, the UN should become the table at which diverse problem-solvers  come together. To this end, a primary step will be to redefine the UN’s  posture from an over-stretched implementor to a connector and convener  that mobilises actors beyond the state: cities, youth movements, tech  firms, regional organisations and civil-society networks. This will  require two crucial changes.

Firstly, regional state groupings, such as the African Union,  Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), European Union, Gulf  Cooperation Council and Mercosur – and even subregional groupings like  the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Pacific  Islands Forum – should be better integrated with the UN for real-time  coordination and shared accountability. While these organisations did  not exist when the UN was formed, they now play more decisive roles than  the UN in both peace and development in their respective regions. The  UN’s regional and even national-level architecture, which is rooted in  twentieth-century geography and institutional silos – should be wound  down and replaced with embedded liaison structures alongside or within  regional intergovernmental bodies.

As the UN shifts from states to networks and from ministries to  platforms, the organisation should, as a second step, establish  structured, durable relationships with global centres of innovation,  including technology hubs, digital-governance labs and AI developers.  Past efforts – such as the appointment of a special envoy on technology  or the creation of institutions such as the UN Global Compact, UN Global  Pulse (an innovation lab that uses big data and AI for development and  crisis response) and South–South Cooperation (a framework which seeks to  foster the sharing of knowledge, technology and resources among  developing countries for mutual growth) – barely scratched the surface  and are better described as trends, not transformation. The UN has  struggled to meaningfully expand or integrate these efforts into its  core operating system. Without such a pivot, the UN risks competing  with more important regional actors and possibly being consigned to  strategic irrelevance in a world where, for example, the  wireless-internet capability of private technology giants like Starlink  increasingly command the power to shape battlefields and humanitarian  operations.

Recentring on its core purpose

The UN was profoundly transformed by the post-colonial expansion of  its membership, which increased from 51 founding states in 1945 to 193  by the end of the twentieth century. Decolonisation brought newly  independent nations into the global arena, seeking to make their voices  heard and to be represented in global economic and political  decision-making bodies. Many of these states, marginalised in the  powerful Bretton Woods institutions, turned to the more inclusive UN  platform to advance their development aspirations and redress global  imbalances. This shift raised a question that the UN continues to  grapple with today: is its core purpose the promotion of peace and  security, or the advancement of economic development, or both? While  this question has at times been difficult to answer, the truth is that  the organisation is struggling to deliver on either front.

Recentring the UN around its core purpose of maintaining  international peace and security will require restoring Article 1(1) of  the UN Charter as its organising principle. This reset will demand  both philosophical clarity and resource reallocation away from  fragmented development roles. Reform efforts must seek to elevate the  Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs as the central  political engine of the UN system, underpinned by secure assessed  funding rather than voluntary contributions. To this end, three steps  are needed. Firstly, the worrying retreat in the UN peacekeeping budget –  this dropped from a peak of approximately $9.9bn in 2018 to $5.6bn for  2024–25, a reduction of more than 40% in less than a decade – should be  arrested and reversed. Studies show that the UN’s performance in peace  and security has declined more than any other function in the last ten  years, a trend that is all the more alarming at a time when conflicts  are raging across the globe. Secondly, the Department of Political and  Peacebuilding Affairs must become the strategic hub for conflict  prevention, preventive diplomacy and early warning – not just through  coordination, but through action. Reforms should lead to the allocation  of more and sustainable resources to preventive diplomacy, and the  transformation of the UN’s under-resourced early-warning systems from  passive monitoring tools into real-time, predictive platforms that  integrate data from its field missions, and its partnerships with  regional political and economic organisations. Finally, as acknowledged  by the secretary-general’s latest report on the UN80 Initiative, the way  in which the UN’s political and peace functions are split across the  Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and the Department of  Peace Operations has made the monitoring of peace and security a  reactive endeavour, with conflicts outpacing current responses. These  silos must be consolidated into a unified entity to enable strategic  coherence.

Redefining the UN’s role

Retooling multilateralism demands more than managerial  rationalisation. It requires a strategic redefinition of the UN’s role  and a retreat from duplicative functions that others are better equipped  to perform. Rather than serving as an underfunded implementor and  competing with better-resourced alternatives, the UN should focus on its  comparative advantage.

This pivot would require a fundamental re-evaluation and, where  appropriate, a deliberate winding down of the UN’s sprawling development  apparatus. The organisation’s role in development has already become  marginal when compared to that of regional development banks and  political organisations, international financial institutions and even  philanthropic networks. Increasingly, the UN lacks a seat at the  national or regional development table, unless it brings financial  resources to match. Too often it functions as a transactional service  provider, executing externally funded projects rather than shaping  long-term policy outcomes. Within the system, multiple entities – the UN  Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Development Programme  (UNDP), UN Office for Project Services, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN  regional commissions and the Resident Coordinator system – are locked in  a competition for shrinking resources and overlapping mandates,  frequently duplicating functions without clear accountability for  results. In this configuration, the UN risks becoming a constraint  rather than a catalyst for development, diverting scarce funds that  could otherwise support nationally driven growth.

Yet the link between peace, security and development remains pivotal  to the UN Charter. The UN’s contribution to development would be best  realised by focusing on its comparative strengths – its convening power,  political legitimacy and tested neutrality. A leaner UN, anchored in  its peace and security mandate, should serve as the pre-eminent platform  for preventive diplomacy and mediation, underpinned by enhanced  capacity for rapid humanitarian response. It should act as a  collaborative partner promoting development consistent with UN-endorsed  norms and goals, and champion equity, inclusion and sustainability  through advocacy and standard-setting rather than direct project  delivery.

As noted, embedding high-level representation within regional  organisations – such as the African Union, the Arab League, ASEAN and  the EU – would allow the UN to foster strategic coherence and shared  early-warning capacities. The organisation’s country-level presence  should be concentrated in the least-developed and most fragile states,  where its integrated humanitarian and peace-development approach adds  unique value. This recalibrated national and regional model would  release resources from the underfunded Resident Coordinator system and  reposition the UN as a strategic, political and moral centre of gravity  for global cooperation.

Reforming the whole, not a part

The world in which the UN now operates has fundamentally changed. It  is shaped not only by the rising economic and political influence of  countries beyond the five permanent members of the Security Council, but  also by the accelerating force of digital technologies. The UN’s  political architecture is increasingly out of step with the immediacy,  complexity and decentralisation of modern geopolitics. In this context,  reform efforts narrowly focused on internal efficiencies, cost-cutting  or mandate reduction fall far short.

The secretary-general must help the UN membership confront a key  source of dysfunction: the structural inertia of the Security Council  and the political drift of the General Assembly. Like Annan, Guterres  should propose reforming both the Security Council and the General  Assembly alongside any changes to the UN’s internal bureaucracy.

Persistent demands for change from emerging powers and  underrepresented regions have met with resistance: while most of the  council’s five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United  Kingdom and the United States) agree on the need for more members, they  are not willing to relinquish or dilute their own veto power, nor do  they wish to accord permanent status to new members. Several proposals  have been made to expand the council: the G4 (Brazil, Germany, India and  Japan) has asked for six additional permanent seats with veto power,  and four additional non-permanent seats; the African Union’s Ezulwini  Consensus, adopted in 2005, asks for no fewer than two permanent seats  for the African continent, each with full prerogatives and veto  privileges; and the 12-member Uniting for Consensus Group led by Italy  and Pakistan has suggested only an expansion in the council’s  non-permanent, long-term seats. To date, none of these have proven  viable.

Despite the entrenched and politically sensitive challenges faced by  the Security Council – expanding its membership and curbing the use of  the veto – an intermediate, two-tiered approach could be a step toward  long-term reform. Firstly, in a step that would build on Annan’s  proposals, and as an alternative to expanding the number of permanent  members from the current five, the secretary-general could put forward a  pragmatic proposal for the creation of six long-term, non-permanent  seats on the council. These seats, each with four-year renewable terms  and no veto powers, would offer an intermediate model that enhances  representation without triggering the political gridlock typically  associated with the creation of new permanent members. This approach  would be politically feasible while acknowledging the long-standing  demands for a more inclusive and representative council.

Secondly, on the equally contentious issue of the veto, the  secretary-general should confront the continual paralysis caused by its  misuse or overuse. A forward-looking proposal could include the  establishment of a Peace and Security Review Panel (PSRP), a General  Assembly-mandated body composed of no more than ten elected  representatives from the UN membership. The body would provide the UN  with an additional mechanism for deliberation when the Security Council  is unable to act due to the use of the veto by one or more of its  permanent members. Without impinging on the Security Council’s mandate,  the PSRP should issue non-binding recommendations to encourage  diplomacy, mediation and regional engagement in situations of paralysis.

The legal basis to create such a mechanism is already in place. The  1950 ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution authorises the General Assembly to  consider matters of international peace and security when the Security  Council fails to act, while the 2022 Liechtenstein resolution requires  assembly debate following any use of the veto. Moreover, the General  Assembly has the authority to initiate institutional measures in support  of collective security. Its past creation of major UN organs such as  UNICEF in 1946 and the UNDP in 1965, both of which have since evolved  into central components of the UN system, has demonstrated its capacity  to found enduring institutions.

To ensure the PSRP’s credibility and effectiveness, the Security  Council should ideally support its mandate and composition. For example,  no sitting Security Council member, whether permanent or elected,  should serve on the PSRP. Such a structure would preserve institutional  balance while enabling the wider UN membership to contribute  constructively to global peace and security when the Security Council is  divided.

The General Assembly has lost much of its influence

The UN General Assembly, once the driving force behind decolonisation  and Cold War diplomacy, has gradually lost much of its strategic  influence. As its membership grew through successive waves of  independence and the end of the Cold War, it became more cautious,  preferring consensus to action. Its focus shifted from issues of global  peace and security to wide-ranging development concerns. While this  shift reflected the legitimate priorities of newly independent states  seeking a voice in global economic affairs, over the years, the General  Assembly’s ability to make timely and consequential decisions has been  degraded. Its agenda has become crowded, its debates procedural and its  resolutions largely symbolic.

To recover its relevance, the General Assembly can and must reclaim  its role as the democratic and moral compass of the UN – a forum for  political vision rather than bureaucratic negotiation. It should also be  equipped with practical tools to act when crises arise. This could  include maintaining a roster of experienced diplomats and mediators who  can be deployed quickly to prevent or resolve conflicts; and  establishing flexible coordination arrangements to organise political or  humanitarian responses. Such measures would make the General Assembly  more responsive and purposeful, while complementing initiatives like the  proposed PSRP and efforts under the UN80 Initiative to retire redundant  mandates.

A UN talent cloud

When the UN was founded in 1945, the architecture of global power was  state-centric, the rules of conflict were defined by territorial  warfare, and Westphalian diplomacy was conducted through formal  treaties, alliance pacts and back-door channels. In that world, conflict  was primarily land-based, the tools of statecraft included armies and  ambassadors, and decisions were made in closed rooms by a narrow group  of policymakers.

The twenty-first century is unrecognisable by those metrics. The  boundaries of conflict are no longer geographic, they are digital,  psychological, economic and climatic. States are no longer the only  relevant actors – they have been joined by networks, platforms,  non-state armed groups, AI-driven propaganda engines and online  movements. The battlefield has expanded from trenches to timelines, and  front lines often encompass data centres and smartphone screens.  Escalation is now instant, driven by viral narratives, algorithmic  triggers or cyber attacks that outpace traditional diplomacy. The result  is a system that is faster, flatter and more fragmented – requiring  agility and anticipation, not just protocols and process.

And yet, the UN’s workforce remains firmly anchored in the twentieth  century, its many agencies and departments staffed for a world that no  longer exists. The UN system was designed for a world of formal  negotiations, predictable deployments and bureaucratic stability. Its  structures, career trajectories and operating logic reflect a model  built for tanks, treaties and telegrams, not for tweets, tipping points  and trust deficits. The organisation continues to rotate generalists  through rigid posts, while the problems it faces demand mission-based  teams, digital fluency and hybrid skill sets that can move between  policy, technology and diplomacy.

Today, peacekeeping, development and humanitarian responses are not  shaped solely by the UN’s institutional machinery, but by digital  platforms and predictive systems, among other technologies. From  disinformation to climate modelling to cyber conflict, the drivers of  global instability are evolving rapidly, too fast for a bureaucratic  system. The key question for reform efforts should not be how the UN is  structured or how many people it should employ, but what the UN  workforce is for. In a world that is increasingly fast-moving,  interconnected and complex, the UN could best serve its defining goals  by cultivating an ecosystem of political, humanitarian and economic  problem-solvers who could collaborate across borders and disciplines to  prevent crises, manage transitions and build peace.

A reimagined UN workforce would function less as a fixed hierarchy  and more as a mission-driven, modular ‘workforce cloud’. A small,  permanent core of multilateral strategists would provide institutional  continuity, supported by networks of regional and technical experts who  could be mobilised rapidly in response to emerging needs. Routine  functions, such as drafting reports or producing lengthy policy  analyses, could be replaced by tools of predictive diplomacy – which  would use data and early-warning systems to help anticipate instability –  and by algorithmic decision supports that would enhance, rather than  replace, human judgement.

Such a shift would allow UN personnel to focus on what they uniquely  offer: negotiation, ethical reasoning, strategic foresight and  partnership-building. Reform, in this sense, is not about digitising the  bureaucracy, but about aligning human talent with purpose – creating a  UN that is less about process and more about problem-solving, and that  is capable of acting with speed, credibility and relevance in a world  defined by constant disruption.

The world needs the UN, but no longer waits for it. The  organisation’s latest attempt to reshape itself, the UN80 Initiative,  appears more defensive in the face of a liquidity crisis, key donor  pressures and, perhaps, internal fatigue than institutionally  transformative. It speaks of ambition, but its content is mostly  managerial.

In an age defined by the backlash against globalisation, reform plans  for the UN should ideally help restore trust in multilateralism – not  just as a process, but as a purpose. Reforms cannot be a question of  simple cost-cutting by making UN officials move from high-cost locations  in New York and Geneva to Nairobi. They should instead aim at strategic  renewal, and retreat where necessary. They should be reframed around  the question of strategic relevance: what is the UN for in a world that  is fragmented, fast-moving and facing systemic threats to peace, trust  and legitimacy? The answer lies not in doing more with less, but in  doing what matters most. Managed wisely, this should not be a diminution  of the UN’s role, but rather a renewal.