Forever North–South? The political challenges of reforming the UN development system

Post 2015: What it Means for the United Nations Development System

United Nations (UN) development work has long followed the binary logic of “developed” countries providing funding so that UN entities support “developing” countries with their national development efforts. This rigid North–South template, however, is unfit for responding to current sustainability challenges that cut across borders and implicate both “developed” and “developing” member states. Against this backdrop, we suggest that the principle of universality promoted by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development holds untapped potential for rethinking how the UN development pillar operates. We first make the general case for universalizing UN development work, i.e., adapt UN support functions to enable engagement with all member states. We then examine the status quo of UN development work in more detail. Building on the strong North–South bias and the limited examples of UN engagement with “developed” countries we identify, we outline the contours of what a more universal future of UN development work could look like and discuss the political economy of our proposal. Overall, we argue that the principle of differentiated universality provides a helpful heuristic for rethinking the roles and functions of the UN development system in light of sustainable development concerns and persisting inter-state inequalities.

This special issue discusses, in-depth, the embedded conundrum of South-South and triangular cooperation (SSTC) whose frontiers are shifted from collaboration to contention within the United Nations (UN) development system and beyond. This introductory article provides the conceptual framework—the contentioncollaboration spectrum—that guides all the contributors and serves as the collective starting point for this project. The moving frontiers of SSTC reflect the shifting historic relationships between the global South and North as well as Southern partner countries. The framework enables the six articles of this special issue to investigate the paradoxical structure of contrasting dynamics of SSTC, which has always been exposed to historical transformations at multi-levels of analysis: global governance, regional engagements, middle power perspectives, and the UN development system and beyond.

United Nations (UN) entities have repeatedly been asked to mainstream their\nsupport for South-South and triangular cooperation (SSTC). However, there is\nhardly any systematic evidence on whether and how they have done so. This article\ncontributes to addressing this gap. The analysis focuses on organizational efforts\nover the last two decades to integrate SSTC support into institutional processes\nacross the UN development system. It centers around a scorecard of fifteen UN\nentities that maps the levels and contours of their organizational focus on SSTC.\nIn light of a highly diverse SSTC support landscape and the complex political\ndynamics behind mainstreaming efforts, the article discusses the way ahead for UN\nengagement with SSTC, including the potentials and challenges of a continued focus\non mainstreaming itself.

MotivationThe share of earmarked funding to the development pillar of the United Nations (UN) has risen to a record level of 79% (2018) of its total revenue/spending. This poses severe implications for the organizational efficiency, aid effectiveness and multilateralism of the UN. Reforms have not been able to stem the trend towards earmarked funding, raising the question of what explains the continued rise of earmarking in the United Nations Development System (UNDS).PurposeThis article aims to add a new perspective on earmarking, specifically in the UN. It tries to explain not the root causes of earmarking, but the dynamics of the significant rise over the last decade. The argument is that earmarking has been driven by three vicious circles: by the rational factors associated with a collective action breakdown, a change in norms of appropriateness, and institutional fragmentation.Approach and methodsThe article draws on funding data from the UN, on 65 interviews with UN staff and donor representatives conducted in the context of a recent research project, and on document analysis. Special attention is given to two donors, Sweden and Germany, dedicated multilateralists that have increased their earmarked resources in recent years.FindingsConventional explanations of earmarking in the UN—dissatisfaction with the performance of UN organizations, the desire for more accountability, policy differences with organizations—cannot fully explain the significant rise in earmarking over the last decade. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that the UN system has reached a tipping point, so that earmarking has become self‐perpetuating.Policy implicationsThe findings put a question mark after the premises that have so far guided practical efforts by the UN and member states to reduce the share of earmarked funding. They suggest that more fundamental changes to rules and incentives are required to rebalance the UN’s funding towards core contributions. Four specific recommendations are derived from the analysis.

Perishing Heritage:

This article contributes to the expanding literature on China's position in international organisations by examining the extent to which, and how, China's exercise of power in the United Nations (UN) development pillar has evolved over the last decade. Building on a four‐legged power framework, we contrast the status quo of power configurations in UN development work with China's evolving attempts to exercise compulsory, institutional, structural and productive power. We identify a heterogeneous set of engagement patterns and find that China's standing as a developing country is an integral part of how its global power ambitions unfold at the UN. While shifts in China's power in and through UN development work have remained limited, taken together insights from the power type analysis suggest that China is in the process of challenging and/or redefining some of the central contours of the UN development pillar.

Over the past few years, the international community has undertaken proactive and extensive efforts to build a cohesive and effective United Nations Development System (UNDS) with more solid institutions and robust leadership. In line with the requirements set out in the UN 2030 Agenda, the United Nations, under the leadership of its secretary-general Antonio Guterres, came up with a reform package that would help contain the further fragmentation of the UNDS. Guided by the principles of extensive consultation, joint action, and shared benefits, China has been extending strong support for the United Nations’ reform efforts while playing an important role in global development cooperation. As the world’s largest developing country, China insists that any development agenda should always focus on development and that poverty eradication should be the top priority of the UN 2030 Agenda. A number of issues must be addressed when planning for future UNDS reform, in particular the targets and viable ways to promote incremental administrative reform, to improve the existing regional coordinator system, to bridge the funding gap and imbalance between core and non-core resources, and to exemplify emerging countries’ best practices.

The purpose of this essay is to show how the United Nations system including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and such specialized agencies as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNESCO, and the International Labour Organization (ILO), etc. has been incorporated into the international network of aid agencies and to discuss some of the consequences for host countries. Specifically the UN development system has been coopted into providing what is known as preinvestment which paves the way for investors of all kinds, generally foreign investors. Preinvestment is a kind of technical which consists of sending ''experts (generally from the specialized agencies) and equipment to a host country and financing fellowship trainees from the country. Preinvestment projects were designed especially to identify and prepare projects for investors, particularly the World Bank and other international financial institutions. In this way the UNDP joins the other agencies in financing the infrastructure necessary for further productive investment, public and private, local and foreign. I show how this occurs in Colombia by describing the country programing exercise of 1971. Country programing is the process by which the resident representative of UNDP and the host government agree upon a list of technical projects that UNDP will finance over a five-year period. Colombia provides an excellent case study. A prime example of an open or outward-looking economy, Colombia has been selected by many international aid agencies as a testing ground for their various programs. In 1948-1949 it was the first nation to be surveyed by an economic mission of the World Bank. In the 1960s it was one of the first four nations to have a consultative group organized by the World Bank. In 1969-1970 it was chosen to be a test case for comprehensive preinvestment planning by the Bank. In 1969 the ILO selected Colombia as the first nation to study under its World Employment Program (International Labour Organization, 1970). It hoped to convince the Colombian government to try ILO strategies for coping with employment problems. In 1971 Colombia became one of the original eighteen nations to undertake country programing with the UNDP. Colombia was also one of the original Latin American nations to receive assistance from the Alliance for Progress. According to the study prepared

The United Nations development system and environmental management

Restructuring, or the reform and rationalisation of United Nations (UN) structures in the economic and social sectors, has been a major issue before the UN for the past several years. Interest in restructuring, however, was evident even in the 1 960s when the Jackson Report and similar exercises were undertaken in an effort to bring about a more efficient alignment of UN structures involved in the promotion of economic and social development. ' Approximately 80 per cent of the budgets of the organisations in the UN system are today devoted to the promotion of economic and social development. The UN system has indeed become an important purveyor of resources on a global scale, yet the basic institutional design of the system is one that was forged in 1945 with somewhat different purposes in mind. The UN system has responded to the challenige of development by adding a plethora of new units and organisations to carry out responsibilities not adequately dealt with by existing ones. The growth and fragmentation of the system have created different types of problems. At a time when it is increasingly recognised that an integrated approach to development is essential, it is becoming more and more difficult to coordinate, in a mutually supporting and reinforcing fashion, the activities of various parts of the system. The proliferation of new bodies also led to fragmentation and the loss of coherence in the system as a whole. Indeed, there has been for some time a widespread belief that the system has become so unwieldy as to be incapable of responding to the wishes of the international community. Developed nations, including the socialist states, are for the most part interested in structural and institutional reform for they provide the largest portions of the budgets of the The 'Jackson Report', a study prepared by Sir Robert Jackson for the UN Development Programme, was completed in 1970. See A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations Development System, UN Publication, Sales No E.70.I. 1, 1970. For further background on the general problem see Martin Hill, The United Nations System: coordinating its economic and social work London: Cambridge University Press, 1978. This study was prepared under the auspices of UNITAR. This paper evolved out of research undertaken in connection with a UNITAR Seminar on The Restructuring of the United Nations System: implications for the creation of a New International Economic Order, held at Schloss Hernstein, Austria in 1978. We are grateful to theseminar participants for allowing us to draw upon the ideas put forward in the discussions. We also appreciate the useful comments offered by other international officials and diplomats. However, we assume responsibilityfor the views and opinions expressed in the paper which are personal

Understanding human development at the international, regional, and national level is essential to the understanding of the needs and wants of vast populations around the world. Since the late 1980's the United Nation's Development Program (UNDP) has published hundreds of reports on development at a variety of geographic extents. This project aims to apply the United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI) to the United States in order to create a sub-national HDI for the measurement of US counties. Due to the inherent spatial methodology in the development of the HDI, this project further introduces the use of geographic information systems tools in hopes of better capturing the results of the development index and employs spatial statistics as a way of identifying clusters of high and low development. The results report high regional, state, and county variation in all of the measures and outcomes associated with the sub-national HDI.

The United Nations are not the highest priority for the French foreign policy. The fundamental principles of independence and of preserving France's rank in the world determine the French foreign policy. In particular France has contributed much in the field of security, with significant contributions during the last decade. Traditionally, France emphasizes the importance of human rights and their protection and the work of the United Nations in the cultural field. The permanent membership in the Security Council enables France to stand for policies that are its own and may be at variance with the positions of other members of the European Union, and Security Policy at the UN. French development programmes continued to be implemented mainly through bilateral or European channels. As a result, France is playing a junior league role in the United Nations development system, with few nationals represented in the bureau of intergovernmental committees of programmes. Keywords: European Union; France; French foreign policy; Security Council; UN Policy

The objective of this article is to reassess the contributions of the Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) approaches in the United Nations (UN) development agenda from 1970 to 1999. We address two questions: How did the UN incorporated the GAD perspective in the context of the Beijing Conference, and why the WID perspective remained dominant in the UN development agenda despite the incorporation of gender? We apply a qualitative methodology encompassing a literature review of feminist academics and a deductive approach based on theoretical elements of the agenda-setting framework and the “Three UN” perspective. We argue that the shift from women to gender in the Beijing Conference incorporated the GAD perspective by removing all critical views and adopting a depoliticized and non-confrontational perspective on gender. In this sense, the WID approach remained dominant because it did not contest diplomatic norms and previous consensus related to development.

Many of the problems that international organizations are tasked with solving are interdependent and require concerted efforts. This interdependence is epitomized in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Yet acting in a concerted manner poses significant organizational obstacles. In this paper, we focus on one of the most prominent of those obstacles, coordination within the UN development system—the collection of UN entities working on development issues. We highlight the complexity of coordination within the UN development system and the changes introduced by the latest reform. We argue that those changes are unlikely to improve the situation significantly and turn to theoretical and empirical sources of inspiration for adjusting those changes. We draw on coordination solutions implemented in nonhierarchical organizational settings, in particular self-managed organizations and humanitarian clusters, to recommend a reorientation of the role of the Resident Coordinator system.