Successful UN 80 reform requires relentless focus on results

The tools are available but is the leadership and governance?

In the 1984 movie Amadeus, Emperor Joseph II tells Mozart: “My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all.”

This scene is an excellent summary of the UN’s reform effort, called UN80, which in a recent report focused on the mandates given to the UN secretariat by member states. The report’s conclusions: too many mandates that are too long, more meetings and longer reports, and duplication across the UN system. Its recommendations: support mandate creation, improve mandate delivery, strengthen mandate review.

UN 80 is picking up the problem from the wrong end of the stick. It should focus on results, not mandates. It’s true that mandates can lead to results. But UN 80 should not start with mandates, but rather with the measurable outcomes member states wish to achieve. Then work backwards along the causal chain to the organization’s outputs.

It’s alluring to focus on mandates and reports because those are within the full control of member states or the secretariat. But it’s not inspiring and it’s not effective. What matters is not these but rather outcomes that affect people’s lives.

The World Health Organization (WHO) faced a similar challenge in 2017. It was producing too many guidelines with too little impact. It successfully reformed its guideline process. But it also recognized that it wasn’t facing a crisis of guidelines but rather of results.

I spent six years at WHO trying to help turn it into a more results-based organization. WHO’s lessons could be applied to form the basis for a different, and more results-focussed, approach to UN 80 reform.

The first lesson is that execution is better than planning. The UN loves planning. In fact, you could say it has planning addiction. But it’s better to start with actual results. In WHO’s case, we published an annual results report with the top results. Doubling down on these to maximize impact is the entrepreneurial equivalent in the UN system of maximizing revenue in a for profit company.

Snapshot from WHO 2024-2025 Results Report. Each of these headings when expanded shows a specific result.

WHO’s investment case builds upon these results. Its goal is to save 40 million lives between 2025-2028.

When it comes to planning, it’s best to start with the desired outcomes. WHO’s started with the health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The problem was that there were too many (around 50) to build a strategy around. So we collapsed them into three indices and set targets. This was the “triple billion” targets: a billion more people leading healthier lives, a billion more with Universal Health Coverage, and a billion more better protected from health emergencies. Not only did we set targets but we also measured and reported on them.

Then, since the SDGs are primarily the responsibility of countries, we developed delivery dashboards to measure what WHO itself did to help countries to reach them.

This method of delivery also did something very important, especially in this age of declining aid and greater national health sovereignty. It provided a way for countries to set and track progress on their own national priorities within a global framework. More than 50 countries have used this framework to develop their own delivery dashboards.

Because the UN and multilateral system has multiple actors, we also developed a way for countries to rate how well these agencies worked together to support country priorities.

This functional approach may be necessary but insufficient given the current crisis in funding. More structural changes may be needed. A focus on results could also enable agencies to reduce duplication and guide structural changes. Member states and agencies could discuss and decide who does what to reach a specific outcome, like improved immunization rates or increased contraceptive use. Again, working backwards from measurable outcomes jointly achieved is preferable to working forward from individual agency mandates.

None of these results-based tools was available in 2017. But they are now. There was a lot of trial and error. And I am not arguing this experience was perfect.

Having developed these tools, we sought to connect them to WHO’s governance and budget. This is where we failed. Perhaps as a result, and magnified by the current funding crisis, these results-based reforms are now being rolled back as focus shifts from strategic repositioning to managerial efficiency. Nevertheless, they serve as a foundation for future efforts towards a results-based WHO and as a model for results-oriented UN reform.

Is the experience in WHO applicable to the rest of the UN system? Yes it is. I would like to address a few possible objections to this claim.

First, health is somehow unique and easier to measure. If this were the case, there would be no SDGs, which cover domains from poverty to peace. Their greatest contribution is to provide a measurement framework. Any agency can pick SDG indicators and work backwards to what it does and what it needs.

Second, some have argued that a results-based reform model developed in a technical agency like WHO may not be applicable to more political UN entities such as the HQ in New York. It’s true that the blend of politics and results may differ across UN entities. However, all UN entities are to some degree a mix of politics and results.

Third, this is just not the way the UN works. Yeah, true, and are we happy with the current system then? This counterargument makes my point. As they say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

One obvious caveat: no amount of results will resolve the geopolitical tensions at the heart of the UN. A key role of the UN is to provide a forum for dialogue on these differences. Results help to build consensus, legitimacy and trust.

Where to start? These results-based tools can easily be adapted to other domains and UN entities. But successful reform will require leadership and governance relentlessly focussed on results. This is the hardest part. It’s what member states should look for in a new Secretary-General (here are some questions to ask SG candidates)— and in themselves.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: The fault, dear friends, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.