Another Quiet Revolution? New Governance Forms in the United Nations System

Transition Studies Review, 2009

2014

The fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, celebrated throughout the world in 1995, was not just an occasion for the reaffirmation of the fundamental principles on which this international organization is built; more important than this was the debate about the future of the United Nations and the necessary reforms in its work on the eve of the twenty-first century. The debate about the United Nations is not limited to the fora of that international organization and its specialized agencies but is also conducted in the media, in the circles of students of international relations, and in the academic circles. There is a broad consensus now about the need to reform the United Nations: this need is accepted by the U.N. Secretariat, by the members of the Security Council and all U.N.'s members, and by outside observers and analysts. The fiftieth anniversary provided an opportunity for stock-taking and for an analysis of the organization's successes and failures. This all th...

FOGGS' Discussion Paper, 2022

Setting the stage-calls to 'fix' the UN and global governance There are certainly many calls to 'fix' the UN and start a next, better phase in global governance.The paper in one table classifies the existing reform proposals into three groups, namely “Reforming the UN for increased effectiveness”, “Rethinking the UN system and its place / role in global governance” and “Drastic revamping of global governance”. Under each main category there is a number of sub-categories.

Kyle Bisnath , 2021

While the United Nations is the only unifying organization that ‘brings together’ almost all the countries of the world, it is obsolete in the context of global governance, not only as a result of the Security Council’s structural prioritization of power and self-interest, but also because of the International Court of Justice’s lack of competency in conflict resolution and its political biases, as well as due to the General Assembly’s problem of voter manipulation.

BPSC-107 Perspectives on International Relations and World History, 2018

The United Nations has been the centerpiece of global governance in the postwar years. This Unit will examine the UN system including its goals, organs and agencies, and achievements and limitations. The unit also discusses the changing nature and dynamics of the UN and the debate on reforming the UN. After going through this Unit, students should be able to: State the objectives/ purposes of the UN; Describe the principles and the principal organs of the UN; Explain the role of the UN System; functions of its specialized Agencies; various Programmes and funding, and the functioning of the Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) Debate on the democratization of the UN System and Explain the prospects of the UN System.

2008

For students of international relations, the knowledge of the role of the United Nations (UN) in international politics is vital. However getting to grips with such a complex and wide-ranging organisation is a daunting task. This book provides a solid overview of the UN, its institutions and their relevance to the stability of the international system. The need for a reform of the UN to handle new threats to international peace and security is also explored. This volume was written for the benefit of students of international relations, human rights and international development. Other beneficiaries include international organisations, academics, diplomats, international law practitioners, policy makers and anyone interested in the study of international organisations. The authors give an informative history and principles of the UN charter, precisely to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the organs and specialised agencies, and analyse the programs and financing of the UN. Th...

Introduction In order to understand the changes of how the UN system operational activities are structured at the country-level, this article contextualizes and presents the Delivering as One UN initiative (DaO) by describing the process by which it emerged and diffused throughout UN member states in the aftermath of the 2005 World Summit. This reform initiative aims to incite better coordination and coherence throughout the system at the local level, tackling the deleterious effects of an overstretched, underfunded, and excessively fragmented institutional structure. Although these motivations to create the DaO initiative and its objectives are often clear, defining the initiative itself is less so. Thus, this article tries to explain the DaO's real purpose and structure. Before introducing the DaO initiative itself, it is necessary to outline the origins of the UN system's fragmented structure and briefly present previous debates and proposals for tackling its negative effects. This historically contextualizes the DaO initiative, identifying its predecessors, which serve as references to explain the initiative singularities in the face of previous reform cycles aimed at streamlining the UN system's institutional framework. Therefore, my hypothesis is that the DaO initiative is not the simple sum of multiple institutional instruments previously established by scattered efforts to incite coherence within the UN system at the local level. Previous institutional innovations were brought about by different reform impetuses—such as Jackson's 1969 Capacity Study and Secretary-General Kofi Annan`s reform agenda in the 1990s. While these are often incorporated under the same umbrella as the DaO initiative, it would be incorrect to infer that the initiative simply reproduces them in a different context today. To shed light on DaO, this article follows the transition of negotiations over UN fragmentation from the System-Wide Coherence topic at the UN General Assembly (UNGA)—in the wake of the 2005 World Summit—to the ongoing debates around the Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Reviews (QCPR). The QCPR debates incorporated some of the System-Wide coherence reform topic content after its discontinuation in 2012 and gained momentum with the integrated approach of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. Furthermore, in the aftermath of SDGs establishment, the UNGA mandated the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to conduct the " Dialogue on the Longer-Term Positioning of the UN Development System " to prepare the formulation of the latest cycle of the QCPR better to be adopted by 2016, introducing institutional changes needed to improve UN cohesion. Including these latest debates permits us to analyze the enlargement of DaO initiative from the idea of efficiency at its emergence to the more nuanced approach represented by the current conceptualization of fit for purpose. This research finds that DaO stems from the reinterpretation of previous reform cycles innovations, such as the resident coordinator system, adapting them to the current time and introducing novelties, and such new funding mechanisms as the multipartner trust funds—that together make the initiative an original and relevant reform effort in its own terms. The analy

2020