The Need for UN Reforms

Eighty years after San Francisco, almost everyone agrees the United Nations needs reforming and almost nothing about it has been reformed. That contradiction is the subject of this note. The puzzle is not that proposals are scarce — the organisation has generated more of them than any institution in history — but that the ones which matter most never move, while a great deal of quieter change has happened almost unnoticed.

Two Reform Debates That Are Constantly Confused

• There are two entirely different arguments going on under the single word “reform”, and conflating them is the commonest error in the subject.
  • The first is about redistributing power — who sits on the Security Council, who holds a veto, whose vote is weighted in the financial institutions. It has produced nothing in sixty years.
  • The second is about making the organisation work — mandates, management, budget cycles, field coordination, accountability, financing predictability. It has produced a great deal, quietly and continuously.
• The difference is not intellectual difficulty but political cost. Redistribution needs the consent of those who would lose by it; managerial improvement costs the powerful nothing and often saves them money.
• Reform requiring a Charter amendment has failed; reform not requiring one has largely succeeded. The Human Rights Council, the Peacebuilding Commission, the independent Resident Coordinator system, R2P and the annual budget cycle were all achieved without touching a word of the Charter.
• A third complication arrived in 2025 and belongs to neither debate: the current round is driven by a cash crisis rather than a design argument, and retrenchment is not the same thing as reform.
  • It can still produce real reform as a by-product, because a crisis is the only thing that has ever moved this institution.

Reform that needs the Charter amended has failed for sixty years; reform that does not has changed the organisation beyond recognition.

Why the Organisation Needs Reforming

The world the Charter was written for no longer exists

• The Charter was drafted for fifty-one states, five great powers and inter-state war; it now serves 193 members in a system whose principal dangers take no such form.
• The Soviet Union, a permanent member named in Article 23, ceased to exist in December 1991, and Russia took the seat without an amendment, an Assembly vote or a Council decision — by a letter from Boris Yeltsin that no member formally contested.
• The distribution of power the Council encodes is gone. China’s economy was negligible in 1945 and is now the second largest; India was not independent; Germany and Japan were enemy states; Africa but for four states was colonial territory.
• The threats dominating the present agenda are named nowhere in the Charter — climate change, pandemics, terrorism, proliferation, cyber operations, artificial intelligence, mass displacement, financial contagion.
  • The organisation adapted by stretching Article 39 to cover disease, climate and terrorism as threats to peace — which works by interpretation rather than by design.

The mandate–capacity gap

• More is asked of the organisation than ever before, on a shrinking budget and with no independent revenue.
  • The regular budget for 2026 is US$3.45 billion, some 7.3% below the 2025 figure of US$3.715 billion — smaller than the budget of many mid-sized cities.
  • The UN has no taxing power and no income of its own; every unit of currency it spends is voted by member states and paid, or not paid, at their discretion.
• Mandates accumulate; resources do not. Every session, resolution and conference outcome adds tasks, and the machinery for retiring obsolete ones barely exists.
  • Tens of thousands of mandates have accumulated since 1945 — many dormant, many duplicative, many surviving only because their sponsor will not agree to deletion.

The legitimacy deficit

• A body seen as unrepresentative is obeyed selectively, and selective obedience is how institutions die.
  • Africa has 54 members, about 28% of the membership, and no permanent seat; so does Latin America and the Caribbean. Europe holds three of the five permanent seats with under a tenth of world population.
• Legitimacy is the organisation’s only real currency. It commands no army, levies no tax and enforces no judgment; what it has is the presumption that its decisions speak for the international community.

The competition: the danger is being bypassed, not abolished

• No state proposes winding the UN up. The realistic danger is that it is routed around until it becomes ceremonial.
• The forums now carrying substantive load:
  • The G20, which handled the 2008 financial crisis and much of the pandemic response, and which admitted the African Union as a permanent member in 2023 — an act of representation the UN itself has never managed.
  • BRICS, now at eleven members with India chairing in 2026, a standing forum for exactly the states most dissatisfied with the 1945 settlement.
  • The Quad and comparable minilateral security groupings.
  • The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, founded because the Bank and Fund would not reweight.
  • Regional organisations acting first with the UN endorsing afterwards, and coalitions of the willing that dispense with authorisation altogether.
• Each is cheaper, faster and free of the veto, which is precisely their attraction and precisely the threat.
• The counter-point is that none of them is universal. None can confer legality, run a humanitarian system, act as treaty depositary or deploy neutral soldiers. Substitutes supplement; they do not replace.

The anchor argument: it would have to be reinvented

• If the United Nations were wound up tomorrow, something extremely like it would have to be built within a decade, because the functions do not disappear when the institution does.
  • Any replacement would face the same design problem — great powers will not join a body that can coerce them — and would reproduce something very like the veto.
• The question is therefore never whether to have a United Nations, only what kind, which is why the reform argument is permanent rather than episodic.

“We need more United Nations, not less United Nations.” — Ban Ki-moon

• Reform and improvement are fundamental to any organisation serving a changing environment; one designed in 1945 and unchanged in 2026 would be an artefact rather than an institution.

The Amendment Machinery: The Wall Every Proposal Hits

Article 108

• Article 108 sets the ordinary amendment route and is the most demanding amendment clause in any major multilateral treaty.
  • Adoption requires a two-thirds vote of the members of the General Assembly — of the whole membership, not of those present and voting.
  • Entry into force requires ratification, by their respective constitutional processes, by two-thirds of members including all five permanent members.
• Two hurdles, and the second is the fatal one: unanimous ratification by the permanent five is a standing veto over the Charter itself.
• “Constitutional processes” means real domestic ratification. In the United States a Charter amendment is a treaty amendment needing the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, so it can be blocked by thirty-four senators without any administration defending the position internationally.
• The circularity is exact: the veto is protected by the veto. No permanent member need argue against limiting its own privilege; it need only decline to ratify.

Article 109 and the review conference that never met

• Article 109 offers the alternative route — a General Conference to review the whole Charter — and it is more open than is usually realised.
  • Article 109(1): a conference may be convened by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly and a vote of any nine members of the Security Council. That Council vote is procedural, so the veto does not apply to convening it.
  • Article 109(2): any alteration the conference recommends still needs ratification by two-thirds of members including all the permanent members — so the veto returns at the decisive moment.
  • Article 109(3) built in a one-time forcing mechanism: if no review conference had been held by the tenth annual session, the proposal was to go automatically onto that session’s agenda.
• The Assembly duly adopted resolution 992(X) on 21 November 1955, deciding a review conference “shall be held at an appropriate time”; the Council concurred that December despite Soviet opposition, because the vote was procedural.
  • A committee was created to fix the time and place, and never fixed either. It was periodically kept in being and quietly expired. Seventy years later the appropriate time has still not arrived.

The three amendments the Charter has actually undergone

Amendment	Adopted	In force	What it did
Articles 23, 27 and 61	17 December 1963	31 August 1965	Council 11 to 15 members (elected members six to ten); voting threshold seven to nine affirmative votes; ECOSOC 18 to 27
Article 109	20 December 1965	12 June 1968	Raised the Council’s share of the vote to convene a review conference from seven to nine
Article 61	20 December 1971	24 September 1973	ECOSOC 27 to 54 members

• The Charter has been amended exactly three times, across five articles, and the last amendment entered into force in September 1973.
• All three were driven by decolonisation. A membership that had doubled made an eleven-member Council indefensible, and the permanent five lost nothing by conceding elected seats.

Why nearly every successful reform has avoided the Charter

• Faced with an unamendable constitution, the organisation has reformed itself by every route except amendment — with results more substantial than the reform literature usually credits.
  • Assembly resolutions creating subsidiary organs under Article 22 — the Human Rights Council (2006), replacing the Commission on Human Rights; the Peacebuilding Commission (2005), created by parallel Assembly and Council resolutions.
  • Interpretation — treating a permanent member’s abstention as not a veto; reading Article 39 broadly; developing peacekeeping, which appears in no chapter at all.
  • Normative declaration — R2P in paragraphs 138–140 of the 2005 Outcome, reconceiving sovereignty as responsibility without altering Article 2(7).
  • Secretariat restructuring under the Secretary-General’s own authority, subject only to budget approval.
  • Financial and procedural rules — results-based budgeting, the annual budget cycle, delegation of authority.
• The cost of this route is real. Non-Charter reform is reversible, contested, and cannot touch composition or voting — which is why the questions that matter most remain untouched.

The organisation has changed enormously since 1945; the Charter has barely changed at all, and the gap between the two is where the whole reform debate lives.

Eight Decades of Reform Attempts

Enlargement and restructuring, 1963–1977

• The first reform wave was demographic, and its object was simply to make the organs match a membership transformed by decolonisation: the 1963 amendments enlarged the Council and ECOSOC, and the 1971 amendment enlarged ECOSOC again.
• The second wave was economic, and came out of the New International Economic Order campaign. After the Sixth Special Session of 1974 the Assembly appointed a Group of Experts on the Structure of the United Nations System, generally called the Group of 25, to redesign the economic and social machinery.
  • The Assembly acted through resolution 32/197 of 1977, restructuring the economic and social sectors and creating a post of Director-General for Development and International Economic Co-operation to run the system centrally.
  • The post never acquired authority over the autonomous agencies and was allowed to lapse in the early 1990s. The diagnosis was right and the remedy had no teeth, which is a pattern that then repeats for fifty years.

The financial squeeze of the 1980s

• This episode matters far beyond its own decade, because it established the mechanism now being used again: a great power’s arrears as an instrument of institutional change.
• The Kassebaum–Solomon Amendment of 1985 directed that the United States withhold 20% of its assessed contributions to the UN and the specialised agencies until budgetary decisions were taken by weighted voting reflecting contributions.
• The institutional response was the Group of High-Level Intergovernmental Experts, the Group of 18, constituted in February 1986, which reported that August with seventy-one recommendations on administrative and financial functioning.
• General Assembly resolution 41/213 of 19 December 1986 adopted the package without a vote and is the decisive document.
  • It accepted a reduction of about 15% in Secretariat staff over three years, and a sharper cut in senior posts.
  • Critically, it settled that the budget should be agreed by consensus in the Committee for Programme and Coordination before reaching the Fifth Committee — conceding in practice an informal veto over the budget to every member, and in reality to the largest contributor.
• The precedent is double-edged. It showed that arrears are the only lever that reliably moves the United Nations — and that the change they produce is shaped by the interests of the withholding state, not by any analysis of what the organisation needs.

Boutros-Ghali and the post-Cold War moment

• The end of the Cold War briefly made everything seem possible, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali produced the most ambitious set of proposals any Secretary-General has written.
  • An Agenda for Peace (1992), commissioned by the first Council summit at head-of-state level, set out a vocabulary that has survived intact — preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding — and revived Article 43 standing forces and a rapid-reaction capability.
  • An Agenda for Development (1994) sought to place development on the same institutional footing as security, insisting that peace, economy, environment, justice and democracy form a single agenda.
  • An Agenda for Democratization (1996), the most contested of the three, argued for a legitimate role in supporting democratic governance within states.
• What killed the vision was Somalia and Rwanda. The failure of UNOSOM II in 1993 and American casualties in Mogadishu produced a collapse in Western appetite for expansive peace operations, and Rwanda in 1994 destroyed confidence in the machinery altogether.
• A Secretary-General who irritated the largest contributor did not survive it. The United States vetoed Boutros-Ghali’s second term in 1996 — the only such denial in the organisation’s history, and itself a fact about the reformability of the office.

Annan’s Renewing the United Nations, July 1997

• Kofi Annan’s 1997 programme is the template for every management reform since, and unlike its predecessors much of it was actually implemented.
• What it delivered:
  • The post of Deputy Secretary-General, the first genuine second office in the Secretariat’s history, created by the Assembly that December.
  • A Senior Management Group functioning as a cabinet, and four Executive Committees grouping the Secretariat’s work into peace and security, economic and social affairs, development operations and humanitarian affairs.
  • A Strategic Planning Unit, the United Nations Development Group consolidating the funds and programmes for the first time, and United Nations Houses giving the system a single field presence.
  • A shift from input-based to results-based budgeting, freeing the Secretariat from line-item control and requiring it to state objectives and indicators.
• The “dividend for development” was the political heart of the package: savings from administration were to be transferred to development programmes rather than returned to member states, and were institutionalised as the Development Account. It was never funded at anything approaching the promised scale, because developed states declined to concede that efficiency savings belonged to the developing world.
• A proposed Revolving Credit Fund of up to US$1 billion, intended to end the liquidity crisis permanently, was rejected by member states — a refusal whose consequences are being paid in 2026.

The Millennium Declaration, 2000

• The Millennium Declaration reformed what the organisation was for rather than how it was structured, and it may have changed the institution more than any restructuring did.
  • It converted a diffuse development mandate into eight time-bound, numerically measurable Millennium Development Goals with a 2015 deadline.
  • Measurability was the innovation. For the first time the system could be held to published numbers, and the development pillar acquired a public identity. The goals themselves belong with the development system.

The High-Level Panel and In Larger Freedom, 2004–05

• The 2003 Iraq crisis produced the most serious institutional stocktaking since 1945, because a permanent member had used force without authorisation and the Council had been publicly bypassed.
• The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change reported in December 2004 as A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
  • It advanced a broadened concept of threat, placing poverty, disease and environmental degradation alongside war, terrorism and proliferation.
  • It proposed five criteria of legitimacy for authorising force — seriousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means and balance of consequences.
  • It endorsed the responsibility to protect and a Peacebuilding Commission, and offered two alternative models for Council enlargement without choosing between them.
• Annan’s own report, In Larger Freedom (March 2005), distilled this into a political programme built on three propositions:
  • Freedom from want — development and the Millennium Goals.
  • Freedom from fear — collective security, terrorism, proliferation, peacebuilding.
  • Freedom to live in dignity — the rule of law, human rights and democracy.
• The organising claim was that the three are indivisible: no development without security, no security without development, and neither without respect for human rights. Annan insisted they be negotiated as a package precisely to stop states taking only the parts they liked, and the 2005 Summit disproved the strategy.

The 2005 World Summit — the largest harvest and the largest failure

• The September 2005 World Summit is the single most important test case in the reform debate, because it shows exactly which kinds of reform pass and which do not.

What it delivered:

• The Human Rights Council (paragraph 159), replacing the discredited Commission on Human Rights, with Universal Periodic Review of every member state.
• The Peacebuilding Commission (paragraphs 97–105), with a Peacebuilding Fund and a Peacebuilding Support Office, filling the acknowledged gap between peacekeeping and development.
• The responsibility to protect, in paragraphs 138–140 — the most significant normative development in the Charter system since 1948, agreed by consensus by every head of state present.
• The Central Emergency Response Fund, giving humanitarian response revolving cash rather than requiring an appeal before each crisis, and the United Nations Democracy Fund.
• A Secretariat integrity package driven by the oil-for-food scandal — an Ethics Office, whistleblower protection, financial disclosure for senior officials and an Independent Audit Advisory Committee.

What it failed to deliver:

• Security Council reform. Paragraph 153 supports “early reform” and says nothing about how, the competing models having been abandoned before the summit opened.
• Disarmament and non-proliferation. Every paragraph on nuclear weapons was struck from the text entirely, so a summit held three years after a war fought over weapons of mass destruction produced not one word on the subject. Annan called it a disgrace.
• A definition of terrorism. Language condemning the deliberate targeting of civilians was diluted from a resolution to a statement of need, and the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism was left where it had lain since 1996.

The 2005 Summit	Result	Why
Human Rights Council	Created	Assembly subsidiary organ; no amendment needed
Peacebuilding Commission	Created	Advisory body; no amendment needed
R2P	Agreed as a norm	Declaratory; changed no text
CERF, UNDEF, Ethics Office	Created	Budgetary and administrative
Security Council reform	Failed	Requires Article 108
Disarmament language	Deleted	Great-power disagreement
Definition of terrorism	Failed	Deadlock over national liberation and state terrorism

• The pattern is unmistakable: everything achievable by resolution was achieved; everything requiring an amendment or a great-power concession failed.

Ban Ki-moon: administration without architecture

• Ban Ki-moon’s decade was one of managerial consolidation, and the charge that it improved administration without touching architecture is largely fair but not wholly.
  • “Delivering as One”, piloted from 2007 and generalised thereafter, gave the system in each country one leader, one programme, one budgetary framework and one office — the most serious attempt yet at country-level coherence.
  • UN Women, created in 2010, merged four separate gender entities into a single body with normative and operational functions — a rare instance of the system successfully abolishing its own units.
  • Umoja, the organisation-wide resource planning system, and the adoption of IPSAS accounting standards gave the Secretariat its first consolidated picture of its own assets and expenditure.
• Nothing was attempted on the Council, the veto, the financing model or the relationship with the agencies. The defence of the record is that plumbing matters: an organisation that cannot say what it owns cannot be reformed in any deeper sense.

Guterres’s three-pillar reform, 2017–19

• The 2017–19 restructuring is consistently undersold and is in fact the deepest management reform the Secretariat has undergone — precisely because it needed no amendment and cost member states nothing.

Peace and security. The Department of Political Affairs and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations were replaced on 1 January 2019 by the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and the Department of Peace Operations, sharing a single regional political-operational structure so that each region has one team advising on prevention, mediation and operations rather than two competing ones. The organising idea is the primacy of prevention.

• Development. The Resident Coordinator was delinked from UNDP and made fully independent on 1 January 2019 — the most consequential development-system reform in decades.
  • Previously the Resident Coordinator was also the UNDP Resident Representative, so the system’s country leader headed one of the agencies being coordinated.
  • The reformed Resident Coordinator reports to the Secretary-General, is empowered over the country team, and is funded by a hybrid arrangement that is itself now underfunded — so a reform designed to secure impartial leadership lacks the money to secure it.
• Management. The Department of Management became two — the Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance and the Department of Operational Support — separating the setting of rules from their delivery.
  • Delegation of authority pushed decisions on personnel, procurement and finance out to managers in the field, with a compliance framework replacing prior approval.
  • The budget moved to an annual cycle from 2020, ending a biennial practice unchanged since 1974 — an unglamorous change that shortens the gap between decision and money, and arguably the most useful reform of the period.

Our Common Agenda, 2021

• Our Common Agenda is the intellectual bridge between the Guterres management reforms and the Pact for the Future, and its distinctive move is temporal: it argues that the system’s deepest defect is short-termism, and that institutions elected on four-year cycles discount the interests of people not yet born.
• What it proposed:
  • A Summit of the Future to agree a renewed multilateral settlement.
  • An Emergency Platform — standing arrangements automatically convening states, agencies, the financial institutions and the private sector on any complex global shock, so each crisis need not be improvised from nothing.
  • A Futures Lab, a Special Envoy for Future Generations and a Declaration on Future Generations.
  • A Global Digital Compact, filling the near-total absence of agreed rules on data, connectivity and artificial intelligence.
  • Moving “beyond GDP” to complementary measures counting natural capital, unpaid care and wellbeing.
  • A New Agenda for Peace and a biennial summit linking the Assembly, the international financial institutions and the G20.

The Pact for the Future

What was adopted

• The Pact was adopted by the General Assembly on 22 September 2024 as resolution A/RES/79/1, at the Summit of the Future — the largest single reform undertaking since 2005, with fifty-six actions across five chapters and two annexes.

Chapter	Core content
Sustainable development and financing	SDG rescue, the SDG Stimulus, international financial architecture reform, debt
International peace and security	A New Agenda for Peace, disarmament, a strengthened Peacebuilding Commission, the Emergency Platform
Science, technology and digital cooperation	Annexed Global Digital Compact; artificial intelligence, data, connectivity
Youth and future generations	Annexed Declaration on Future Generations; youth participation
Transforming global governance	Security Council reform, Assembly revitalisation, ECOSOC, the financial institutions

• On the international financial architecture the Pact goes further than any previous UN text: commitments to realign quotas and voting shares to present economic realities, to expand multilateral development bank lending, to reform the sovereign debt architecture and to deliver the SDG Stimulus.
• On Africa the language is the strongest ever adopted. Members committed to redress “the historical injustice against Africa” as a priority, treating enhanced African representation in the Council as a distinct objective rather than one bloc’s claim among many.
• It commits to Assembly revitalisation, better follow-up of resolutions and a stronger Presidency, and to a strengthened Peacebuilding Commission bridging the Council, the Assembly and the financial institutions.
• The Council-reform language records the commitment without the model, leaving categories, the veto and numbers to the negotiations. The architecture of Council reform, its blocs and its models belongs with that debate itself.

How it was adopted, and why that matters

• Consensus was preserved only by procedural force. In the final hours Russia moved an amendment to reinsert non-interference language and weaken the Secretary-General’s role, supported by a small group of states.
• The Congo, for the African Group, moved a no-action motion, which carried by a large margin, and the Pact was adopted without a vote.
• Two readings are available and both are true: the consensus was thinner than the adoption suggests; and the African Group, not the great powers, defended the text — a genuine change in who now carries multilateral reform.

An honest assessment

• The case against:
  • It creates no new legal obligation. It is an Assembly resolution, hortatory by nature, whose verbs are “commit”, “encourage” and “recognise”.
  • Nothing was amended, created or abolished — no organ reformed, no voting rule changed, no financing mechanism established.
  • Implementation depends on precisely the machinery whose dysfunction the Pact describes — the Council for peace and security, the Bretton Woods boards for financial architecture, the Fifth Committee for money.
• The case for:
  • Agenda-setting is a real form of power. What enters a consensus text becomes the baseline for the next negotiation, and language once conceded is very hard to withdraw.
  • The Africa language has already moved the Council debate, reappearing in the intergovernmental negotiations’ own convergence findings.
  • The financial-architecture language moved the financing debate, and reappears in the Sevilla Commitment of July 2025.

The Pact changed no rule and no structure; what it changed was the agreed description of what is wrong, which is the only currency an assembly of sovereign states actually issues.

The UN80 Initiative

What it is

• Launched in March 2025 for the organisation’s eightieth anniversary, UN80 is the live reform process and the most consequential thing happening to the institution in 2026. It runs on three workstreams.
  • Operational efficiency — immediate savings in administration, duty stations, travel, procurement and duplicated back-office functions.
  • Mandate implementation review — a systematic audit of the tens of thousands of mandates accumulated since 1945, identifying those dormant, duplicative, completed or obsolete.
  • Structural change — deeper reconfiguration, including mergers of entities and reallocation of functions across the system.

What has actually happened

• The May 2026 progress report described the status quo as “untenable” — unusually blunt language from a Secretariat that ordinarily writes to avoid offence.
• A 21% reduction in Secretariat posts for 2026, with roughly 2,900 posts abolished in the budget approved in December 2025.
• 220 posts relocated out of high-cost duty stations and about 1,900 more moved across the system to cheaper locations.
• Eleven Secretariat administrative teams merged into a single platform, and ten payroll centres consolidated into one.
• A Digital Hub in Valencia, concentrating technology services away from New York and Geneva costs.
• A Humanitarian Compact piloted in Afghanistan, Haiti, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia and Sudan, aiming at one humanitarian operating model per country rather than parallel agency structures.
• A review of peace operations launched in 2025, reporting to the Assembly and Council later in 2026 — the first comprehensive re-examination since the Brahimi report.

Reform or retrenchment?

• The critique is the important part of this section, and it is not a minor quibble.
  • This is budget-driven consolidation, not designed reform. The proximate cause is one member’s non-payment; the sequence began with a cash shortfall and worked backwards to a restructuring, rather than beginning with a judgement about purpose.
  • Relocation and merger reduce cost without addressing mandate. Moving a post from Geneva to Nairobi changes the price of doing a thing, not whether the thing is worth doing.
  • The deepest cuts fall where the constituency is weakest. Human rights monitoring, special procedures and the smaller normative offices have no member-state champion with money, while functions that powerful states value are protected.
  • Calling contraction “reform” legitimises it. A permanently smaller organisation, once labelled a modernisation, is very hard to restore when the arrears are eventually paid.
• The case for the process is also real.
  • A crisis is the only thing that has ever moved this organisation — 1986 proves it, and reform proposals made in calm conditions have died in committee.
  • Mandate review is overdue on its own merits. A body that cannot say what it has been told to do cannot prioritise, and cannot defend its budget.
  • The Fifth Committee’s mid-2026 decision easing the rule on returning unspent balances is a genuine structural fix that the crisis produced and thirty years of calm did not.

	1986	2025–26
Trigger	Kassebaum–Solomon withholding; US arrears	US arrears; disengagement from the wider system
Vehicle	Group of 18; resolution 41/213	UN80 Initiative, Secretary-General-led
Cuts agreed	~15% of Secretariat staff over three years	~21% of posts; about 2,900 abolished
Structural gain	Consensus budgeting	Mandate review; back-office consolidation; cash-balance rule eased
Who set the agenda	The withholding state	The withholding state

The Reform Agenda, Organ by Organ

The Charter itself

• The enemy-state clauses are the clearest case of dead text that nobody will spend capital to remove. Articles 53, 77 and 107 preserve, against any state that was an enemy of a signatory in the Second World War, the right of the victors to take enforcement action without Security Council authorisation.
  • Russia has invoked Article 107, alongside the Yalta arrangements, in support of its position on the islands off Hokkaido, which is why Japan treats the clauses as live rather than antiquarian.
  • Japan and the other former Axis states campaigned for deletion after the Cold War and succeeded on paper: the Assembly, at its fiftieth-anniversary session in 1995, expressed its intention to initiate the procedure to amend the Charter by deleting the clauses “at its earliest appropriate future session”.
  • Thirty years later nothing has been initiated. The permanent members fear that opening the Charter for an uncontroversial deletion invites amendments they do not want; others prefer to hold the deletion back as a bargaining chip.
  • This is the reform debate in miniature — a change every member agrees is right, that costs nothing, that has been formally resolved upon, and that cannot be made.
• The Trusteeship Council is the Charter’s other fossil. Its work ended with the independence of Palau on 1 October 1994; it suspended operation on 1 November 1994 and meets only if occasion requires, yet Chapter XIII remains and it remains a principal organ.
  • Abolition requires an amendment — proposed in 2005 and never executed.
  • The alternative is repurposing it as guardian of the global commons — the high seas, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, outer space, Antarctica and the electromagnetic spectrum — for which a trusteeship body with no state constituency is unusually well suited.
• Article 2(7) and the reconciliation with R2P. The provision forbids the organisation to intervene in matters essentially within domestic jurisdiction, subject only to Chapter VII enforcement.
  • Practice has moved a very long way from the text — human rights supervision, universal review of every member, atrocity monitoring, election assistance and R2P all operate in a space the provision appears to close.
  • The gap has been bridged by interpretation rather than amendment, on the argument that grave violations are not by their nature “essentially domestic”; states that dislike the trend invoke 2(7) precisely because the text still supports them.

The General Assembly

• The Assembly’s problem is not power but use: the only universal organ, controlling the budget and electing to every other body, dissipates its authority across an agenda nobody can read.
• Revitalisation, pursued by a dedicated working group since 1991, has produced procedural gains and no change in standing.
  • Agenda rationalisation — clustering, biennialisation and sunset clauses for items, of which there are now well over a hundred and eighty a session, many carried unchanged for decades.
• A stronger Presidency. The President serves one session, arrives with a small office funded largely by voluntary contributions from the President’s own state, and departs before institutional memory forms. Proposals include a properly budgeted office, a longer handover and a code of ethics.
• The Assembly’s residual security capacity is real and underused: Uniting for Peace allows it to meet in emergency special session and recommend collective measures when the Council is deadlocked, most recently on Ukraine. The doctrine and its limits belong with collective security itself.
• The veto initiative is the most significant Assembly reform in twenty years. Resolution 76/262 of 26 April 2022 requires the President to convene a formal Assembly meeting within ten working days of any veto, at which the casting state speaks first and must justify itself before the whole membership. It imposes a reputational cost, not a legal one, and needed no amendment because the Assembly was regulating only its own procedure.
• The override proposal is the maximalist version and it fails on the law. It has been argued — including by Indian diplomats such as Hardeep Puri, writing from inside the Council about the disorder of its decision-making — that the Assembly should be able to override a veto by special majority.
  • The Charter does not permit it. Under Article 24 the Council has primary responsibility, under Article 25 only its decisions bind, and under Articles 10–12 the Assembly may only recommend. Conferring override power needs an amendment, and an amendment needs the consent of the states being overridden.
• A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly is the perennial democratising proposal — a chamber of parliamentarians, initially advisory, alongside the inter-governmental Assembly.
  • Against: apportionment is insoluble — by population two states dominate, by state it is undemocratic; members from authoritarian states would not be freely elected; governments will not fund a body constituted to criticise them; and it duplicates the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

The Security Council

• Council reform is the largest item on the agenda and the one where nothing has moved since 1965 — the case, the blocs, the models, the veto proposals and the impediments belong with that debate in its own right.
• What matters here is the shape of the deadlock. The Intergovernmental Negotiations have run since 2009 on five clusters — categories of membership, the veto, regional representation, size and working methods, and the Council–Assembly relationship — and there is still no negotiating text.
• Working-method reform is the part that moves, because it needs no amendment: penholding, Arria-formula meetings, presidency practice, and the ACT Code of Conduct and France–Mexico initiative on voluntary veto restraint in mass-atrocity situations.

ECOSOC and the development system

• ECOSOC’s defect is constitutional, not managerial: it was given coordination without authority. The agencies are autonomous treaty bodies whose relationship agreements under Article 63 let ECOSOC recommend and receive reports, and nothing more.
• The record is real but partial: the 2013 revitalisation gave ECOSOC a coherent annual cycle and the High-Level Political Forum, and the 2018 repositioning produced the independent Resident Coordinator. The Council and the agencies in full belong with the development system itself.
• The radical proposal comes from Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that the system should merge or close some existing programmes and create new ones built around the Sustainable Development Goals — the first serious suggestion in decades that the answer is fewer entities rather than better coordination among the same number.

The Secretariat

• The Secretariat is a bureaucracy with substantial discretion and unusually weak external oversight, which is the source of most proposals about it.
• Accountability and internal justice.
  • The Office of Internal Oversight Services reports through the Secretary-General it audits; the Independent Audit Advisory Committee created in 2005 was the response.
  • Whistleblower protection remains weak in practice — retaliation findings are rare, and staff who report misconduct routinely leave.
• Selecting the Secretary-General.
  • Article 97 provides only that the Assembly appoints on the Council’s recommendation, which means the permanent five select and the Assembly ratifies, historically through closed straw polls.
  • The 2016 process was the first significant opening — public candidacies, published vision statements and Assembly hearings — but the Council’s straw polls remain private and decisive, and the 2026 succession runs on the same hybrid model.
  • The single non-renewable seven-year term is the standing structural proposal. An incumbent seeking renewal must avoid antagonising any permanent member for five years; one longer term removes that incentive, and Boutros-Ghali’s denial in 1996 is the case that proves it.
• Senior appointments and patronage. The most senior posts are distributed by informal national reservation, certain departments effectively belonging to certain states, which cuts against Article 101(3) and its requirement that efficiency, competence and integrity be paramount.
• Representation and mobility. Geographical balance remains skewed toward the states that fund the organisation; gender parity achieved among senior appointments has not been achieved system-wide or in field missions; and every mobility framework proposed has been resisted by staff unions and diluted by the Assembly.

The International Court of Justice

• The Court’s structural weakness is consent-based jurisdiction, and every proposal about it seeks to widen consent without amending the Statute.
• The three standing proposals: wider acceptance of the optional clause under Article 36(2), accepted by only about a third of members; withdrawal of self-judging and blanket reservations that hollow out the declarations that exist; and extending the authority to request advisory opinions beyond the Assembly, the Council and authorised agencies. The Court in full belongs with its own treatment.

Peacekeeping

• Predictable financing. Peacekeeping runs on a separate assessed budget — US$5.1 billion for 2026–27, down from US$5.4 billion — paid late by the largest contributors, which forces delayed reimbursement of troop-contributing countries, most of them developing states effectively lending to the system.
• Troop-contributor consultation. The states that supply the soldiers are largely not the states that write the mandates, and the triangular relationship between Council, Secretariat and contributors remains the standing grievance.
• Mandate realism. The Brahimi Report of 2000 set the enduring diagnosis — clear, credible and achievable mandates, matching resources, and a Secretariat willing to tell the Council what it does not want to hear — and its central recommendations remain only partly implemented.
• The shift to regional operations is the live change. Security Council resolution 2719 of 21 December 2023 created a framework for African Union-led peace support operations funded from UN assessed contributions, case by case. The doctrine, the missions and the current crisis belong with peacekeeping itself.

The human rights machinery

• The Human Rights Council inherited its predecessor’s central defect. The Commission on Human Rights was wound up because states with poor records sought membership to shield themselves, and election by absolute majority with a suspension mechanism has not solved this; members under active investigation continue to be elected.
  • The Universal Periodic Review is the genuine innovation — every member examined on a fixed cycle — which removes the selectivity charge even as it dilutes rigour.
• Treaty-body reform is the unglamorous crisis. Ten treaty bodies of independent experts receive state reports on a fixed cycle, and the backlog runs to years, with states in arrears of reports and committees in arrears of consideration.
• The funding cuts land here first and hardest. Human rights is the smallest pillar by budget, with the fewest state defenders and the most state opponents, and is therefore the first casualty of an efficiency drive — the sharpest illustration of why budget-driven reform is not neutral reform.

Financing Reform

• Every structural weakness of the United Nations reappears in its finances, and this is where the reform argument is least technical and most nakedly political. How the system is funded is a separate subject; what should change about it is the question here.

Article 19 and why it does not bite

• Article 19 is the Charter’s only sanction against non-payment and it is close to unusable. A member in arrears by an amount equal to or exceeding its contributions for the preceding two full years loses its vote in the General Assembly — unless the Assembly is satisfied the failure is due to conditions beyond the member’s control, an exemption granted routinely.
• It fails against a large debtor for three reasons.
  • The calculation runs on assessed contributions for the two preceding full years, so a state paying just enough to keep its debt below that line never crosses it, however large the sum outstanding.
  • A sophisticated debtor can time payments to remain permanently inside the threshold, and the largest debtor does exactly that.
  • It has never been applied to a permanent member, and it is hard to imagine an Assembly voting to disenfranchise one.
• The sanction is therefore effective only against states too small to matter and inert against the only state whose non-payment can threaten solvency. Proposals to tighten it — interest on arrears, forfeiture of candidature, suspension from the Fifth Committee — founder on the same fact: they require the agreement of the states they would bind.

The crisis of 2025–26

• Arrears at 1 December 2025 stood at about US$1.586 billion — roughly US$709 million left from 2024 and US$877 million of unpaid 2025 assessments — with the United States accounting for the overwhelming majority.
• The Assembly approved a 2026 regular budget of US$3.45 billion, the Secretariat was required to cut 15% of expenditure, and cash was projected to run out around July 2026.
• In early 2026 the organisation returned US$227 million to member states and offset a further US$72 million against arrears — money credited to states but never actually collected, so the UN was refunding cash it did not have.
• That fact is the sharpest illustration of the design flaw. Unspent appropriations had to be surrendered to members as credits regardless of whether the corresponding assessments were ever paid, so the states that paid on time were credited with money the states that did not pay had never provided.
• The one genuine structural fix of the decade came in mid-2026, when the Fifth Committee agreed a landmark decision easing the rule requiring the return of unspent balances, letting the organisation retain cash against unpaid assessments. It is the first repair to the liquidity architecture in decades, it needed no amendment, and it took a solvency emergency to achieve what thirty years of technical argument had not.

The Working Capital Fund

• The Working Capital Fund exists to bridge the gap between the start of the financial year and the arrival of contributions, and has never been sized for the job — a fraction of a single month’s expenditure against arrears approaching half the annual budget.
• Annan’s proposed Revolving Credit Fund of up to US$1 billion was the serious attempt at a permanent solution, and the argument against it was revealing: a properly capitalised reserve removes the pressure on delinquent states to pay, and therefore removes the leverage non-payment confers.
• The liquidity crisis is not an oversight nobody has got round to fixing; it is a feature the largest contributors decline to remove, because a chronically illiquid organisation is a compliant one.

Earmarked voluntary funding

• Assessed contributions are the smaller half of the story. Across the system, and overwhelmingly in the funds, programmes and agencies, most income is voluntary and most of that is earmarked to projects chosen by the donor.
  • In several major agencies roughly four-fifths of income is voluntary and earmarked, so the organisation cannot set its own priorities, plan beyond the project cycle, or fund the unglamorous core functions on which visible ones depend.
  • Earmarking converts a multilateral body into a contractor executing bilateral programmes under a multilateral flag — the largest unacknowledged transfer of authority from members collectively to donors individually.
• The Funding Compact is the system’s attempted bargain: donors commit to a higher share of core, un-earmarked, multi-year funding, and entities commit to transparency and results. The entity side has been delivered more fully than the donor side.
• The most interesting model comes from outside the Secretariat. The World Health Assembly decided to raise assessed contributions progressively toward 50% of the WHO’s base budget by 2030–31 — a deliberate reversal of thirty years of drift, agreed by members who accepted that predictable core funding is the price of an organisation capable of independent judgement.

Independent revenue, and why it is always refused

• The proposal that the organisation should have income of its own is over half a century old and has never come close to adoption. The mechanisms canvassed:
  • A currency transaction tax, a very small levy on foreign exchange dealing, associated with James Tobin, capable of raising sums that would dwarf the regular budget.
  • A levy on international arms transfers, on the argument that the trade generating demand for peacekeeping should help pay for it.
  • Aviation and maritime bunker-fuel levies, on activities that are internationally regulated and nationally untaxed.
  • Carbon pricing with a share of revenue assigned to global public goods.
  • Royalties from the global commons — the deep seabed, where the International Seabed Authority already administers the common heritage of mankind, and analogous claims to the electromagnetic spectrum and geostationary orbit.
  • A tax on global trade or on military expenditure, the versions most often canvassed in the general reform literature.
• Every one has been refused, and always for the same reason.
  • Taxation is the core attribute of sovereignty. A body that could levy would be a body that could compel, and no state has conceded that power to an international organisation.
  • An independently financed organisation would be an autonomous one — able to fund a mission, an investigation or a report its largest contributors opposed.
  • Autonomy is precisely what the principal funders do not want, because the power of the purse is the most reliable influence they hold in a body where each has one Assembly vote.
• This is the cleanest demonstration that UN reform fails for political rather than technical reasons. The mechanisms are designed, costed and administratively feasible; what is missing is the consent of those who benefit from the organisation’s dependence.

The United Nations is kept poor on purpose, because an organisation that could pay for itself would not need to ask.

The Bretton Woods linkage

• Guterres’s framing is that the Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions both encode the world of 1944–45, and that reforming one while leaving the other is incoherent — the Council distributing security authority by 1945 victory, the Bank and Fund distributing economic authority by 1944 quota.
• The Pact for the Future adopts the linkage, and the Sevilla Commitment of July 2025 carries it into the financing-for-development track.
• The two arguments reinforce each other: a Global South out-voted in Washington and unrepresented in New York has the same grievance in both places, which is why “reformed multilateralism” is always stated as a package. The governance of the Bank and the Fund is a subject in its own right; what matters here is the linkage.

“We cannot create a future for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents.” — António Guterres

Why Reform Fails: A Hierarchy, Not a List

• The obstacles are ordered, and the first dominates all the others.

1. The amendment lock. Article 108 hands each permanent member an absolute and costless veto over the Charter, exercisable by simply not ratifying. The veto is protected by the veto, and everything below this obstacle is secondary, because complete agreement among the other 188 members would still change nothing.

2. There is no constituency for the general interest. Every state supports reform in the abstract and defends its own position in the particular, and no delegation is instructed to represent the health of the institution as such. The Secretariat is the only actor with an interest in the whole, and it has the least authority. The asymmetry is permanent: benefits are diffuse and long-term, costs are concentrated and immediate, so the losers organise and the winners do not.

3. “Reform” means incompatible things.

Who	What “reform” means	What they will not concede
Global South	Representation, voice, development resources	Obligations without seats
The largest funder	Lower cost, narrower mandate, tighter oversight	Budgetary control, or its assessment ceiling
The permanent five	Working methods, efficiency	Categories of membership, the veto
Aspirant powers	New permanent seats	Enlargement of the elected category alone
Regional rivals	No new permanent seats	Any model elevating their neighbour
The Secretariat	Predictable financing, delegated authority	Nothing — it has nothing to concede

4. Zero-sum framing. Seats, voting weight and budget shares are finite, so every gain is visibly someone’s loss, and the negotiation has none of the mutual-gains structure that makes trade agreements possible. Even working methods are read as zero-sum by permanent members who see transparency as a transfer of influence to the elected ten.

5. No forcing event and no deadline. Nothing happens if reform fails — there is no expiry date, no sunset clause, no automatic review, and the organisation continues to function badly rather than stopping. Article 109(3) was the drafters’ one attempt at a forcing mechanism, and its fate shows what happens to deadlines states can decline to meet. The exception proves the rule: the only forcing events in eight decades have been financial.

6. Reform fatigue. Eight decades of panels, groups and agendas have produced a professional reform discourse whose main product is the next initiative, and delegations that have watched three cycles rationally discount the fourth.

7. The funder’s leverage cuts both ways. Arrears force change, and change forced by arrears is not necessarily good change. The 1986 settlement bought consensus budgeting, a real constraint on the Assembly’s Charter power of the purse, conceded not because it was right but because the money had stopped. The 2025–26 round is the same transaction at larger scale, and its content is being determined by which functions can be cut fastest rather than by which matter most.

India and Reformed Multilateralism

• India’s position is captured in a single phrase — “reformed multilateralism” — and the phrase is doing precise work. It rejects the choice between defending the existing order and abandoning it, insisting the institutions must be made representative in order to be preserved, and it treats the Security Council, the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO as one package, on the argument that 1944 and 1945 encode a single distribution of power that no longer exists.
• Narendra Modi put it to ECOSOC in the terms India has used since: only reformed multilateralism, with a reformed United Nations at its centre, can meet the aspirations of humanity. Sushma Swaraj framed the alternative as institutional death — a United Nations unwilling to accept reform will erode its own legitimacy and meet the fate of the League of Nations.

What India actually asks for

• Expansion in both categories, permanent and non-permanent, rather than the elected-only enlargement its opponents propose.
• Text-based negotiations on a fixed timeline, on the ground that fifteen years of discussion without a draft is a method of avoidance rather than of negotiation.
• Coalition work through the G4 and the L.69 group of developing states from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, for which India’s Permanent Mission acts as secretariat.
• Support for the African common position, treated as a precondition rather than a competing claim — a stance the Pact’s Africa language has vindicated.
• The Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism, tabled by India in 1996 and still unadopted, blocked by the dispute over national liberation movements and state action. India’s counter-terrorism diplomacy has its own history; what belongs here is that the system’s longest-standing normative gap is one India identified and has failed to close.
• Development financing and the voice of the developing world, pursued through the Voice of the Global South Summits, and the African Union’s admission to the G20 in 2023 under India’s presidency — the clearest demonstration that India can deliver representation reform in a forum where no veto operates.

The honest counter-question

• India presses hardest for reform of institutions it is not inside, and the pattern is worth stating rather than avoiding: the demand for democratised decision-making is directed at the Council, the Fund and the Bank, and is not pressed with equal force where India already holds a favourable position.
• India’s record on binding international adjudication is restrictive. Its declaration under Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute carries an unusually long list of reservations — Commonwealth disputes, multilateral treaties, hostilities, territorial questions, matters of domestic jurisdiction — which is hard to reconcile with advocacy of a rules-based order.
• None of this defeats the case, which rests on representation rather than on India’s virtue; but a claim to lead a reformed order is stronger when the claimant accepts the constraints of one.

The Balance Sheet

Area	What changed	What did not
The Charter	Three amendments — 1963/65, 1965/68, 1971/73 — all enlargements	Nothing since 1973; enemy-state clauses resolved for deletion in 1995 and still in force; Trusteeship Council still a principal organ
Security Council	Enlarged once, in 1965; working methods, penholding, the veto initiative	Composition, categories and the veto; no negotiating text after fifteen years
General Assembly	Procedural revitalisation; resolution 76/262; a modestly stronger Presidency	Agenda rationalisation, follow-up machinery, any change in legal standing
ECOSOC	Enlarged twice; 2013 revitalisation and the High-Level Political Forum	Authority over the autonomous agencies; duplication across the system
Secretariat and management	Deputy Secretary-General, results-based budgeting, Umoja, IPSAS, DMSPC and DOS, delegation of authority, annual budget cycle from 2020	Independent oversight; appointment patronage; effective whistleblower protection
Development system	Delivering as One, UN Women, the independent Resident Coordinator from 2019, the Funding Compact	Consolidation of entities; the earmarking of voluntary funds
Human rights machinery	Human Rights Council and Universal Periodic Review replacing a discredited Commission	Membership criteria; the treaty-body backlog; and the pillar is cut first
Peacekeeping	The 2017 peace and security restructuring; resolution 2719 on African Union-led operations	Predictable financing; troop-contributor voice; mandate realism
Financing	Consensus budgeting in 1986; the 2026 easing of the return of unspent balances	Article 19’s bite; the Working Capital Fund’s size; any independent revenue

Assessment

• The realistic near-term agenda consists entirely of measures needing no amendment, which is both its strength and the measure of how much remains out of reach: working methods in the Council; veto restraint through the ACT Code of Conduct and resolution 76/262; financing predictability built on the 2026 cash-balance decision and a shift toward assessed, un-earmarked money; mandate review conducted as a standing exercise rather than an emergency; regional partnership under resolution 2719; and selection reform for the Secretary-General by Assembly practice and Council convention.
• What remains unreachable is exactly what the reform literature spends most of its time on — new permanent seats, veto limitation, an override power, a parliamentary chamber, independent revenue.
• The reformability of the United Nations is not a technical problem awaiting a clever solution. Every serious proposal has been designed, costed and published, some of them repeatedly for fifty years.
• It is a political problem whose solution requires the consent of those it would cost, and the amendment rule ensures that those it would cost are the ones who decide. Every reform that has succeeded is one that cost the powerful nothing — a subsidiary organ, a norm, a budget cycle, a merged department, a code of conduct — and every reform that has failed is one that would have moved power.
• The corollary matters as much as the claim. The organisation of 2026 runs peace operations the Charter never envisaged, supervises human rights the Charter placed beyond its reach, sets development goals for the planet and has quadrupled its membership. It changed enormously, and almost never through its constitution.
• The 2025–26 crisis will be judged by which of the two reform debates it feeds. If the cash emergency yields a genuine mandate review, a repaired liquidity architecture and a smaller organisation doing fewer things properly, it will have been reform. If it yields only a permanently contracted institution whose human rights work was cut because it had no constituency, it will have been retrenchment wearing the vocabulary of reform — and the difference will not be visible for a decade.

The question was never whether the world needs a United Nations; if it were dissolved it would have to be rebuilt, and rebuilt with much the same flaws, by much the same states.