Announced by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in March, the UN80 Initiative works along three tracks to increase the world body’s efficiencies, review the implementation of all UN mandates, and consider structural changes and program realignment. If undertaken skillfully, UN80 reforms can reinforce the even more far-reaching actions adopted through the Pact for the Future last September and help the UN navigate the turbulent waters ahead. Together, the UN80 Initiative and Pact for the Future follow-through agendas hold out the promise that the United Nations can emerge as a more nimble, tech-savvy, and outcome-oriented organization.
 
UN Member States must work closely with their Secretariat to fully leverage the “UN80 Initiative” to help create a more agile, cost-effective, and impactful UN system.

By Richard Ponzio
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 11 2025 (IPS)

With the ink hardly dry on the Pact for the Future outcome for modernizing global governance from last September’s Summit of the Future, the United Nations’ long-standing financial crisis has morphed into an extreme liquidity crisis.

Exacerbated by multiple factors — rising populist political forces in traditional international organizations and foreign-aid-financing donor countries, pressure to significantly expand military budget outlays in response to heightened geopolitical tensions, the emergence of non-military security threats involving the environment and new technologies, and renewed frustrations about perceived bloated and dysfunctional international bureaucracies — there are no quick fixes.

Ongoing deliberations in New York and Geneva suggest that major humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Program, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and International Organization for Migration, could see severe annual budget shortfalls as high as 30% to 40%, and the UN Secretariat may need to let go at least 20% of its staff, in addition to other immediate cost-saving measures.

Internal UN modeling suggests that the year-end cash deficit will, absent budget cuts, leave the Secretariat without money to pay salaries and suppliers by September of this year, and a letter to Member States by the Secretary-General, in February 2025, warned that the UN’s peacekeeping budget to pay for troops may run dry by mid-year.

A UN briefing to Member States in June projected that in 2025 alone, resources across the UN system are expected to shrink by up to 30% compared to 2023 (directly impacting an estimated 30 to 60 million lives).

Though in unenviable positions, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and his UN system colleagues have, fortunately, chosen to shape a constructive course in response to the severe budget cuts now underway, in de facto ways, by major Member States (including the United States and China), which have largely financed and provided global political leadership through the world body for years.

The “UN80 Initiative,” first announced by the Secretary-General on March 12, 2025, aims to:

• • Rapidly identify efficiencies and improvements in the way the United Nations works.
• • Thoroughly review the implementation of all mandates given to the UN by Member States, which have significantly increased in recent years.
• • Conduct a strategic review of deeper, more structural changes and program realignment in the UN System.

It is critical that Member States work closely with the Secretariat to fully leverage this multi-pronged effort to help advance, rather than detract from, the Pact for the Future, by creating a more agile, cost-effective, and impactful UN system.

UN80 Initiative Status Update

On August 1, the UN Secretary-General presented to the General Assembly (GA) his “Report of the Mandate Implementation Review,” the chief outcome of the UN80 Initiative’s second workstream.

Utilizing new data analytical tools and focusing on the systemic and structural issues that cut across mandates — namely, a request or directive for action set out in the UN Charter, a resolution, or decision by a UN intergovernmental organ — the review recommends, inter alia, the creation of digital mandate registries to flag potential mandate overlap before it happens, as well as the development of shorter, clearer, more focused, and adequately resourced mandates.

Far more than a simple budgetary exercise and administrative tune-up, the UN80 Initiative is poised to complement the reforms detailed through the Pact for the Future’s 56 distinct actions by bringing greater coherence to a UN system now consisting of some 140 different entities, including 67 Secretariat Departments and Offices, 33 Peacekeeping Operation and Political Missions, 15 funds, and 14 specialized agencies.

It represents a welcome and long overdue opportunity to streamline the world body’s organizational structure and reduce significant overlap in its mission and operations, while still enabling the UN system to tackle effectively both short-term and “long problems.”

Following the Mandate Implementation Review, the Secretary-General is anticipated to soon introduce a package of concrete proposals with respect to the UN80 Initiative’s first workstream on efficiencies and improvements, with particular attention given to service delivery for those most in need of UN system support.

These recommendations will then feed into this September’s General Debate of the General Assembly and the revised UN Secretariat proposed program budget for 2026 (coinciding with the GA debate). Around March/April of 2026, the UN Secretariat proposed program budget for 2027 will be introduced, also reflecting suggested UN80 Initiative changes.

Additionally, in June, senior Secretariat officials began to brief Member States on possible UN entity mergers, program realignments, and other considered structural reforms (UN80’s third workstream organized through seven thematic clusters across the UN system).

These ambitious ideas are likely to have an especially significant bearing on how quickly and effectively Pact for the Future implementation proceeds.

Taking the UN80 Initiative and Pact for the Future Forward, Together

The full realization of the Pact for the Future — and its associated Global Digital Compact (GDC) and Declaration on Future Generations (DFG) — means a United Nations system capable of keeping pace — and empowering people and nations to better grapple — with the pivotal challenges and opportunities of the present era, including devastating wars, runaway climate change, unconstrained artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of human rights, and promoting human development in today’s hyper-connected global economy.

At the same time, the UN80 Initiative wields the potential to complement and reinforce the Pact for the Future in at least four essential and concrete ways (as illustrated in the figure below).

First, it encourages a healthy examination of the world body’s core strengths — and many clues can be found within the Pact’s negotiated 56 Actions, as well as the UN’s long-cited three pillars of peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights.

Second, the initiative creates chances to promote long-overdue system-wide efficiency gains, from rebalancing a top-heavy bureaucracy to employing technology in creative new ways for back-office and other critical functions. Though it is regrettable (given the massive, urgent, and global planetary and human needs associated with present polycrisis, referring to how overlapping, urgent, complex, and sometimes even extreme problem-sets intersect and further exacerbate global threats and challenges), in the short-run, the UN and other global institutions will be forced to do less-with-less financial, human, and other resources.

However, as multilateral institutions progress in their restructuring — including through the tech-modernization, foresight, and behavioral/cultural shift program known as “UN 2.0” (an integral part of the Pact) — opportunities to achieve more-with-less could, at least in theory, begin to take shape, delivering a more nimble and effective organization.

How the UN80 Initiative Can Reinforce the Pact

Source: Original Figure, Stimson Center

Third, UN80 considers the need to relocate staff and associated capabilities closer to where operational needs are greatest, across Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, as well as to consolidate departments/agencies, thereby striking a healthier balance between the UN system’s core functions and actual form.

Fourth and finally, it welcomes thoughtful deliberation among powerful governments and other key stakeholders about a new Grand Bargain to underpin the multilateral system for the coming decades. The agreement reached among the UN’s founding members eight decades ago, on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, can be found in the opening words of the Charter’s Preamble: “… to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind …” Though it will need to arrive organically through purposeful and broad-based consultations, the new Grand Bargain should weigh fundamental global shifts since World War II and a new “logic for the future.”

The new logic taking shape will no doubt reflect renewed fears of another cold war or even a Third World War facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI), drones, and other cutting-edge technologies. But it is also likely to reflect intense though contentious concerns about environmental destruction, population growth, and migration — all terms not mentioned in the Preamble to the Charter.

Just as the 1945 United Nations struck a balance between inclusive idealism (one-state, one-vote within the General Assembly; a system introduced in the failed 1919 League of Nations) and Great Power realism (a small Security Council led by five veto-wielding major countries), the new (2025?) Grand Bargain will need to ponder similar kinds of global governance innovations — combining the exigencies of changing Great Power politics and technology with pragmatic and far-sighted multistakeholder approaches — to tackle new and emerging 21st century challenges.

If well executed by a motivated and mission-driven international civil service and backed by a cross-regional group of champion governments and partners in civil society, the combined UN80 Initiative and Pact for the Future follow-through agendas hold out the promise that the United Nations can navigate the turbulent waters ahead and come out a more nimble, tech-savvy, and outcome-oriented, rather than process-driven, international organization on the other side.

In short, they could collectively give renewed and tangible meaning to making the UN, as often phrased during the more than decade-long crisis of global governance, “fit-for-purpose,” with the ability to achieve more-with-less financial, human, and other resources.

Richard J. Ponzio, PhD, is Director, Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and Senior Fellow, the Stimson Center, Washington DC. He is also Co-Director of the Global Governance Innovation Network.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

United Nations General Assembly Hall

By Richard Ponzio
WASHINGTON DC, Sep 14 2023 (IPS)

Another UNGA (UN General Assembly High-Level Week, September 18-23, 2023) is almost here. Leaders and other senior representatives of the world body’s 193 Member States will gather again for this truly one-of-a-kind annual congregation in New York for high-stakes diplomacy and plenty of domestic political posturing.

While who’s not coming this year has already garnered some headlines (including Presidents Xi, Macron, and Putin, as well as Prime Ministers Modi and Sunak), the international community has rarely faced so many concurrent challenges on a colossal scale requiring global leadership—from extreme poverty, climate change, and unconstrained artificial intelligence to Great Power tensions, destructive conflicts, and a bulging global youth population in urgent need of new skills, opportunities to take initiative, and, perhaps most of all, hope.

In particular, here are six key milestone gatherings and sets of issues to watch during the 78th High-Level Week – in these major civil society-led UNGA side-events:

SDG Summit | September 18-19

Marking the halfway point to the deadline set for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, world leaders will adopt the SDG Summit’s centerpiece Political Declaration following, at times, tumultuous negotiations.

The declaration seeks to provide high-level guidance on “transformative and accelerated actions” for all countries delivering on the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.

Regrettably, two anticipated topline messages from the summit are that only fifteen percent of the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets are on track to be reached this critical decade, with over 500 million people likely still to live in extreme poverty by 2030.

For the SDG Summit to succeed, the states people convening in New York must demonstrate renewed political will—combined with concrete actions and backed up by financial resources and other support infrastructure—in the fight to reverse these trends.

Representatives must also push-back against ill-founded, yet lingering concerns among influential developing countries that the Summit of the Future (SOTF) might divert scarce resources and attention away from their core development priorities. At the recent conclusion of India’s presidency (now passed to Brazil for 2024 and South Africa for 2025), the G20 just lent its “full support,” through the G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, to both the SDG Summit and SOTF.

Summit of the Future Ministerial Meeting | September 21

The Summit of the Future, to be hosted next September 22-23, 2024 in New York, has a stated goal to reaffirm the Charter of the United Nations, reinvigorate multilateralism, boost implementation of existing commitments, agree on concrete solutions to challenges, and restore trust among Member States.

As elaborated in the Stimson Center and partners’ recent Global Governance Innovation Report 2023(section six) and Future of International Cooperation Report 2023(section four), the intertwined nature of the SDG Summit and Summit of the Future has the potential to yield multiple mutually reinforcing dividends, beginning with the SOTF preparatory Ministerial Meeting to immediately follow next week’s SDG Summit.

In a recent decision of the President of the General Assembly, the SOTF will feature a “Pact for the Future” with chapters on: (i) Sustainable Development & Financing for Development, (ii) International Peace and Security, (iii) Science, Technology and Innovation and Digital Cooperation, (iv) Youth and Future Generations, and (v) Transforming Global Governance.

In short, whereas the SDG Summit arrives at a relatively brief high-level political statement that acknowledges global governance systems gaps in need of urgent attention to accelerate progress on the 2030 Agenda, the preparatory process for next year’s Summit of the Future is designed to realize—through well-conceived, politically acceptable, and adequately resourced reform proposals—the actual systemic changes in global governance needed to fill these gaps.

Climate Action Summit | September 20

UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s Climate Ambition Summit aspires to garner new momentum for effective climate action among representatives of governments, business, finance, local authorities, and civil society, as well as “first movers and doers.”

According to leading climate scientists, we may have as few as six to seven years to catalyze the monumental set of actions required to shift course and to avert the worst impacts of unchecked climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscores the connections between climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals, and the UN has warned that climate impacts threaten to reverse many of the gains made over previous decades to improve lives.

With the looming potential to overwhelm progress achieved on the wider UN agenda, the climate crisis represents the present era’s quintessential global governance conundrum, making bold and urgent action all the more critical.

Last week’s Africa Climate Summit brought much-needed ingenuity and energy for positive change from many of the countries and communities already experiencing the wide-reaching effects of climate change.

Following just on the heels of this first-of-its-kind climate summit in Nairobi, the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit aims to catalyze action from the private sector, finance, and civil society, as well as local and national governments. To this end, Stimson is also proud to support the Mary Robinson, María Fernanda Espinosa, and Johan Rockström-led Climate Governance Commission, whose Governing our Planetary Emergency recommendations will be released around COP-28 (November 30-December 12, 2023) in Dubai.

Ukraine, Sudan, Afghanistan, and other Hotspots (UNGA General Debate and UNSC Ministerial)

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, attending his first General Assembly High-Level Week in-person since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has landed a coveted speaking slot on the first morning (Tuesday, 19 September) of the Assembly’s General Debate, shortly after the traditional lead-off statements by the new President of the General Assembly (Ambassador Dennis Francis of Trinidad and Tobago), Brazil (President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), and the UN’s host nation, the United States (President Joe Biden).

Ukraine will also feature again next week on the Security Council’s agenda in a special high-level session, “Upholding the purposes and principles of the UN Charter through effective multilateralism: Maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine.”

General Debate statements by world leaders are also anticipated to speak to other hot conflicts and fragile states – including Sudan and Afghanistan – and the Secretary-General’s recently introduced New Agenda for Peace.

Mr. Guterres’s related Emergency Platform proposal may also garner some attention, building on this month’s Security Council open debate, “Advancing Public-Private Humanitarian Partnership” featuring World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

New UN Youth Office and Assistant Secretary-General for Youth

Further to last year’s adoption of General Assembly Resolution 76/306, the seventy-eighth session of the General Assembly will further be remembered for the establishment of a new United Nations Youth Office, led by a soon-to-be-appointed Assistant Secretary-General for Youth (while bidding farewell and appreciation to the outstanding UN Youth Envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, and her office).

Together, they will, inter alia, advance youth issues across the UN agenda, while working to promote “meaningful, inclusive and effective engagement of youth” across the UN system.

Well-timed to coincide with the one-year-to-go preparations for the September 2024 Summit of the Future, a successful UN Youth Office will need, according to my colleague Nudhara Yusuf and Search for Common Ground’s Saji Prelis, to understand the urgency and responsibility to act in upcoming UN policymaking and programming, to coordinate across existing youth engagement mechanisms, and to embrace new forms of leadership suited to a highly interconnected planet.

Financing for Development (September 20), the Bridgetown Initiative, and Global Financial Architecture Reform

On September 20, the General Assembly will convene its second High-Level Dialogue on Financing for Development since the adoption of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. Against growing calls for Global Financial Architecture reform and greater climate financing (through Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative, which she is widely expected to showcase during the 78th High-Level Week), developing countries will likely continue to express concerns that rich nations are still not doing enough to finance the SDGs and other development priorities, while donors will emphasize the importance of Addis commitments on domestic resource mobilization and fighting corruption.

Two related policy ideas to keep a close eye on next week are the Secretary-General Guterres’ recent proposals: (i) for the G20 to agree on a $500 billion annual stimulus for sustainable development through a combination of concessional and non-concessional finance (as mentioned in the recent G20 Declaration); and (ii) for a Biennial Summit on the Global Economy bringing together the G20, World Bank, IMF, and UN for enhanced global economic governance.

Conclusion

As the United Nations enters its seventy-eighth year, questions continue to swirl about the world body’s vitality and its ability to keep pace with fast-changing trends in socioeconomic dynamics, the environment, peace and security, and technology.

If world leaders, together with diverse partners across civil society and the business community, step up next week with genuine pledges of support for concrete actions in the above areas—and on related subjects such as preventing future pandemics and other health crises, bolstering food security, and safeguarding human rights—they can go a long toward quieting critics who consider the UN to be merely a talk shop.

Importantly, doing so will dramatically improve conditions and expand the window of discourse, priming global leaders to seize the generational opportunity to renew and innovate our global governance system in the run-up to next September’s Summit of the Future.

Richard Ponzio is Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and a Senior Fellow at Stimson. Previously, he directed the Global Governance Program at The Hague Institute for Global Justice, where (in a partnership with Stimson) he served as Director for the Albright-Gambari Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance.

Source: Stimson Center, Washington DC

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A mother and her children fled conflict in Lashkargah and now live in a displaced persons camp in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF Afghanistan

By Sultan Barakat and Richard Ponzio
DOHA / WASHINGTON DC, Jan 24 2022 (IPS)

On December 22, 2021, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to allow for more humanitarian assistance to reach vulnerable Afghans, while preventing the abuse of these funds by their Taliban rulers.

With more than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million citizens—afflicted by drought, disease, and decades of war—depending upon critical life-saving aid to survive the harsh winter months, the decision to carve out an exception in UN sanctions against the ruling regime is timely.

All the more so as Afghanistan quickly becomes ground zero for United Nations humanitarian operations worldwide.

At the same time, addressing the underlying political, cultural, and socioeconomic challenges that continue to fuel widespread deprivation, violence, and corruption in Afghanistan requires a strategy and targeted investments in development and peacebuilding too.

Fortunately, these are also areas where the UN maintains a decades-long track record in Afghanistan (including from 1996-2001, the last period of Taliban rule) and elsewhere.

Moreover, the Security Council’s recent request to Secretary-General António Guterres to provide “strategic and operational recommendations” on the future of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), by January 31, 2022, offers an opportunity to adapt the world body to the country’s fast-changing political, security, social, and economic context.

To channel fresh ideas and critical observations in advance of the Secretary-General’s presented proposals to the Security Council on Wednesday, January 26 and subsequent UNAMA mandate review in March, we convened this past October a group of experts and former Special Representatives of the Secretary-General to Afghanistan at our institutes, the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

Inspired by this thoughtful, unfiltered exchange, we personally arrived at several, time-sensitive recommendations elaborated upon in our new policy brief A Step-by-Step Roadmap for Action on Afghanistan: What the United Nations and International Community Can and Should Do:

First, the United Nations should aid in negotiating some conditionalities put forward by Western powers. Whilst a step-by-step roadmap for cooperation is needed, vital life-saving humanitarian aid should never be made conditional on the Taliban taking certain actions.

Given the acute differences between the Taliban and the international community, diverse mechanisms are needed for addressing distinct humanitarian and non-humanitarian issues alike. Both sides have made opposing demands that essentially negate one another, while the needs of millions of innocent, vulnerable Afghans continue to grow.

In direct immediate support of malnutrition, urgent health services, and other kinds of emergency, life-saving support detailed in a new Humanitarian Response Plan, donor countries should take careful heed of the UN’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal for a single country, announced on 11 January 2022, requesting more than USD $5 billion this year for Afghanistan.

This follows from the USD 1.2 billion pledged by nearly 100 countries at a United Nations Secretary-General convened ministerial, on 13 September 2021 in Geneva, as well as subsequent additional pledges of humanitarian aid through international organizations, such as the World Food Program and UNDP, by South Korea, France, and Norway.

Second, there is a need to remain focused on the intersections of humanitarian, developmental, and peace challenges, rather than roll-out humanitarian-only models of response in Afghanistan. To advance more integrated approaches that break down the traditional siloes of the international aid system in responding to the Afghan crisis, the humanitarian-development-peace nexus offers a powerful framework.

The United Nations and other actors have implemented Triple Nexus programming in Afghanistan in recent years, including refugee return and reintegration, asset creation, and social safety net programming.

The world body can play a vital role as a convening power and knowledge broker, facilitating local-international and whole-of-society dialogue on how to adapt nexus programming concepts and approaches in the uncharted territories of Afghanistan’s fast evolving and highly challenging operating environment.

As bilateral aid likely recedes among most major donors, the UN could also serve as a chief oversight body and conduit of international assistance through multiple emergency trust funds. In doing so, it will provide de facto international development coordination assistance, with an eye to maintaining for all Afghan citizens the delivery of basic public services in such critical areas as healthcare, education, and power generation.

The world body is also well-placed to support the new Islamic Development Bank humanitarian trust fund and food security program for Afghanistan, announced on December 19, 2021 at a gathering of thirty Organization of Islamic Cooperation foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers in Islamabad.

Third, durable peace in Afghanistan can only be reached through high-level political will that is best expressed through an empowered mandate and sufficient resources for UNAMA (ideally led by a Muslim diplomat with the gravitas and skills demonstrated by the UN trouble-shooter Lakhdar Brahimi).

For the UN to be truly catalytic, it is vital that it is entrusted with a comprehensive mandate to perform its full suite of well-known and field-tested functions, including in the areas of reconciliation, development coordination, and humanitarian action.

To get beyond the blame game and build trust between the Taliban and other Afghan parties, the world body must be allowed to provide its good offices and other peaceful settlement of dispute tools to resuscitate an intra-Afghan dialogue toward reconciliation and political reform.

At the same time, the Afghan Future Thought Forum, chaired by Fatima Gailani, continues to be the only independent platform that brings together influential and diverse Afghan stakeholders (men and women), including Taliban and former government officials, to produce practical solutions for long-term peace and recovery in Afghanistan.

With the support of the UN, this Afghan owned and led initiative can be leveraged to work toward a more representative governing structure that safeguards, for example, girls and women’s rights, freedom of moment, and against reprisals toward those who previously fought the Taliban.

Finally, the greatest obstacle to functioning relations between the Taliban and international community is the non-recognition of the new ruling regime in Kabul, which requires a medium to long-term vision to resolve. Although the Taliban are publicly seeking international recognition, these efforts are unlikely to bear fruit immediately.

Rather than continually seeking recognition, the Taliban interim administration should instead focus on governing Afghanistan and averting an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. Demonstrating some level of governing competence—as well as a desire to reconcile and share some governing authorities with past political rivals —through concerted action is the best way for the movement to gain slowly widespread international legitimacy and eventual recognition.

To avoid Afghanistan becoming once again an operating base for international terrorist groups or an even greater source of refugees—both vital interests of the international community, including the Western powers—a multi-faceted strategy that also deploys targeted resources beyond solely humanitarian aid is needed urgently.

With thousands of staff dedicated to alleviating human suffering across Afghanistan, coupled with the West’s almost non-existent political leverage with the Taliban regime, the United Nations must resume its central development and peacebuilding roles, in addition to delivering and coordinating immediate life-saving humanitarian aid.

With the backing of major global and regional powers and the cooperation of both Taliban and non-Taliban factions alike, the UN can help to place Afghanistan on a new development and political path toward a more stable country that, over time, improves the prospects for all Afghan citizens.

Sultan Barakat is Director of the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha, Qatar and Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of York. He also taught at York University (U.K.). Richard Ponzio is Senior Fellow and Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

The authors wish to thank Muznah Siddiqui for her helpful research assistance for this commentary.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Fergus Watt and Richard Ponzio
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 27 2019 (IPS)

Despite the polarization and stasis that characterizes so much of the present politics at the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres is betting that the 75th anniversary of the organization, in 2020, will provide an opportunity for the international community to begin to address the “crisis in multilateralism,” and to shape a more robust and effective organization.

On 14 June, the UN General Assembly adopted by consensus a “modalities resolution” (A/RES/73/299, titled “Commemoration of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the United Nations”) setting out the framework and practical arrangements for actions by various UN stakeholders to mark the UN’s 75th anniversary.

A growing civil society network, the “UN2020 Initiative,” has campaigned since early 2017 for using this anniversary as an opportunity to involve governments and other UN stakeholders in a process of stocktaking, review and consideration of measures to strengthen the organization.

And prospects for a stand-alone resolution for UN75 gained momentum earlier this year with the active encouragement from the President of the General Assembly, Ms. María Fernanda Espinosa of Ecuador.

The resolution identifies the theme for the 75th anniversary (which is meant to guide all activities, meetings and conferences organized by the United Nations in 2020) as “The future we want, the United Nations we need: reaffirming our collective commitment to multilateralism.”

A Leaders Summit is scheduled for 21 September 2020, while “meaningful observance ceremonies” took place on June 26 (the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Charter) and October 24 (UN Day). A youth plenary will also be organized in the spring of 2020.

An outcome document will be adopted at the Leaders’ Summit. Arrangements for the negotiation of this political declaration are to be determined by the President of the 74th session of the General Assembly, Ambassador Tijani Muhammad-Bande of Nigeria.

Against this backdrop, the Secretary-General has appointed a Special Adviser for 75th Anniversary Preparations, highly-regarded Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond of Chile, who had previously served in the S-G’s Executive Office as Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Coordination.

At a meeting June 5-7 hosted by the Washington-based Stimson Center, along with the Global Challenges Foundation, One Earth Future Foundation, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung New York Office, Hochschild shared with civil society representatives a draft of the Secretary-General’s ambitious plans for a “UN@75” program of activities.

The Secretariat aims to stimulate a “global dialogue” at the local, national and international levels on “The future we want, the United Nations we need.”

From “classrooms to board rooms, village houses to houses of parliament,” the intention is to employ a mix of intellectual, communications, media, and engagement tools in order to catalyze widespread public engagement on the role of the UN system in addressing global challenges.

All 130 UN Resident Coordinators will be involved, as will UN regional commissions and many UN agencies and programmes. Young people in particular are expected to be drivers of this worldwide dialogue.

The planning document for UN@75 recognizes that an unprecedented confluence of existential threats, systems changes and new actors, including the role of mega-corporations and tech giants, present new governance challenges.

These changes “are occurring faster than public institutions ability to adapt or regulate.” The document calls for “a reflection on successes as well as failures, inviting transformational thinking about the potentially momentous paradigm shifts for how the multilateral system as a whole confronts global challenges.”

More than a simple commemoration, these proposals go far beyond what was organized for the UN’s 70th anniversary in 2015.

Considering the current levels of international hostility and indifference to the very idea of international cooperation and a rules-based world order, the commitment of Mr. Guterres to an ambitious UN@75 program, though commendable, surely faces long odds. Many public officials in similar circumstances would be more risk-averse.

Is there a public appetite for such a far-reaching worldwide dialogue about the United Nations and global governance? We shall see.

Excerpt: