INVESTING IN THE UNITED NATIONS
For a Stronger Organization Worldwide
Report of the Secretary-General
Summary
Today's United Nations is vastly different from the Organization that emerged from the San Francisco conference more than 60 years ago. Its normative work remains important and substantive. In the past decade however, it has undergone a dramatic operational expansion in a wide range of fields, from human rights to development. Most notable has been a fourfold increase in peacekeeping. The United Nations today has a wide range of new missions, a $5 billion peacekeeping budget and 80,000 peacekeepers in the field – including more than twice as many civilian staff as are employed at Headquarters in New York. The United Nations, in short, is no longer a conference-servicing Organization located in a few headquarters locations. It is a highly diverse Organization working worldwide to improve the lives of people who need help.
Such a radically expanded range of activities calls for a radical overhaul of the United Nations Secretariat – its rules, structure, systems and culture. Up to now, that has not happened. The staff members of the Organization – its most valuable resource – are increasingly stretched. Our management systems simply do not do them justice.
Previous reform efforts, while generating some significant improvements, have sometimes addressed the symptoms rather than the causes of the Organization's weaknesses, and have failed to adequately address new needs and requirements. In the present report, responding to the request addressed to me by the leaders of all United Nations Member States at the World Summit held in September 2005, I propose measures that I believe are needed to enable future Secretaries-General to carry out their managerial responsibilities effectively, as well as measures to enable the Organization as a whole to make better use of its managerial and human resources. This is an opportunity, which may not occur again until another generation has passed, to transform the United Nations by aligning it with, and equipping it for, the substantive challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. It is a chance to give Member States the tools they need to provide strategic direction and hold the Secretariat fully accountable for its performance.
To achieve this goal, the United Nations Secretariat and Member States need to combine the current reviews of oversight systems and internal justice – both of which are essential to building a stronger, more dynamic and more transparent United Nations but are currently proceeding on separate tracks – with major reforms in six other broad areas, all closely interrelated. The present report provides detailed proposals for reform in those six areas, as well as in the area of change management itself; the 23 proposals are summarized below.
I. People
Staff skills in the United Nations today are not aligned with current needs. We cannot always attract the best people and we lack the funds to help those we do recruit, particularly in the field, to develop their careers. We have too few skilled managers and a system that does not integrate field-based staff even though it is their skills and experience that the United Nations increasingly needs. To address this:
- Recruitment should be proactive, targeted and faster.
- Staff mobility should integrate headquarters and field staff; it should be a condition of service and a prerequisite for promotion; and the authority of the Secretary-General to move staff laterally should be reaffirmed and expanded.
- Career development should be fostered through targeted training, mandatory requirements for advancement and diverse career paths.
- Contracts should be streamlined and conditions of service harmonized.
II. Leadership
The present top management structure of the Secretariat is not well equipped to manage large and complex operations; and the Secretary-General, as Chief Administrative Officer, has too many people reporting to him directly. To address this:
- The role of the Deputy Secretary-General should be redefined by the Secretary-General so as to delegate to him or her formal authority and accountability for the management and overall direction of the functions of the Secretariat.
- The 25 departments and other entities currently reporting directly to the Secretary- General should be reorganized to significantly reduce the reporting span.
- A major new leadership development plan is needed, covering recruitment, training and career development, to build middle and senior management capacity.
III. Information and communications technology
Despite a number of improvements to the United Nations information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure in recent years, the overall system remains fragmented, outdated and underfunded compared to similar large and complex organizations. The lack of any integrated system to store, search and retrieve information generated at the United Nations holds back progress in many other areas. To address this:
- The post of Chief Information Technology Officer should be created, at the Assistant Secretary-General level, to oversee the creation and implementation of an effective information management strategy.
- & 10. An urgent upgrading of Secretariat-wide ICT systems should be undertaken.
IV. Delivering services
Compared to other organizations, including many within the United Nations family, the Secretariat has been slow to explore new ways of delivering services, such as relocation and outsourcing. While the character of the United Nations and the sensitivity of some of its tasks means that a core group of functions should always be carried out by a dedicated core of international civil servants at Headquarters, there are non-core functions for which other options should be seriously examined. To address this:
- The General Assembly should modify previous guidance, allowing the Secretariat to consider all options for alternative service delivery, including identifying the potential for relocation and outsourcing.
- Systematic cost-benefit analyses of the potential for applying these options in select administrative services should be completed in the next 12 months.
- - 15. A range of measures will be implemented to improve and tighten procedures for United Nations procurement of goods and services.
V. Budget and finance
Currently, the United Nations suffers from a highly detailed, cumbersome and insufficiently strategic budgeting process, with more than 150 separate trust funds and 37 distinct peacekeeping accounts, each with its own support costs and arrangements. The financial management process is highly manual and fragmented. Not enough authority is delegated and – partly as a result – management performance is not adequately assessed. To address this:
- The cycle for reviewing and adopting the budget should be shortened, and budget appropriation consolidated from the present 35 sections into 13 parts; and the Secretary- General should have expanded authority to redeploy posts as necessary, and to use savings from vacant posts.
- Peacekeeping accounts should be consolidated and trust fund management streamlined; the level of the Working Capital fund and the ceiling of the commitment authority granted by the General Assembly should be increased; and the financial processes of the Organization should be re-engineered to allow significant delegation of authority within a framework of accountability.
- The budget and planning process should be explicitly linked to results and managerial performance, as part of a more rigorous monitoring and evaluation framework.
VI. Governance
Underlying a smoothly running United Nations must be a system of governance that gives Member States the information and tools they need to provide proper guidance to the Secretariat, and to hold it accountable for fulfilment of their mandates and stewardship of their resources. Currently, the budget and decisionmaking process often lacks clarity and transparency, and at times the interaction between the Secretariat and the Committees of the General Assembly is dysfunctional. To address this:
- Secretariat reporting mechanisms should be improved, including through the development of a single, comprehensive annual report, and the 30 existing reports on management should be consolidated into six reports.
- New principles to guide the interaction between the Secretariat and the General Assembly on management and budgetary issues should be introduced to make it more focused, strategic and results-oriented.
- The General Assembly is urged to consider ways to reform its interaction with the Secretariat on management and budgetary issues.
VII. The way forward: investing in change
To help drive and implement the overall process of management reform across all these areas, a dedicated change management office should be created, with clear terms of reference and a time limit, to work with heads of department and other key Secretariat leaders to plan and coordinate the implementation of the reforms. Ideally, this office would also liaise closely with a small but representative group of Member States. And, as called for in the 2005 World Summit Outcome, this broad process must be underpinned by a carefully constructed staff buyout, to allow for a reinvigoration of the United Nations workforce. To address this:
- Dedicated resources should be appropriated to the change management process; in particular, resources will be needed at an early stage for a change management office and a staff buyout.
- An appropriate intergovernmental mechanism should be set up to work with the change management office.
Only by an effort on this scale – a management reform as broad as it is deep – can we create a United Nations Secretariat that is fully equipped to implement all its mandates, using the resources of its Member States wisely and accounting for them fully, and winning the trust of the broader world community. In an age when more and more of the problems facing humanity are global and the world has more and more need for a global institution through which to forge and implement global strategies, it is more than ever necessary for the United Nations to live up to the promise of its Charter – and, above all, to the demands and hopes of present and future generations.