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As the 2030 Agenda struggles to deliver results, aid budgets collapse, and shocks destabilize the global economy, the next Secretary-General will be under pressure to reshape the UN’s development mandate.
Our [Re]Group primer will guide you through the debate on how the UN can better fulfill its ambitions to eradicate poverty, reduce global inequalities, and help countries develop more sustainably.
Check back for updates as the conversation evolves and new proposals emerge.
JUMP TO: History, UN Development System, The Development Pillar, International Development in Crisis, UNDS Under Pressure, UN80 and the UNDS, The Development Playbook
One | A Bit of History
The UN’s mandate was never just about stopping wars. It was also designed to build the conditions for lasting peace. In the preamble of the UN Charter, signatories promised to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,” establishing the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to oversee global economic, social, and health matters.
As explored in our series of historical essays tied to the World’s Toughest Job podcast, the UN has played four distinct roles in the development space:
An operational provider
The UN development system has its roots in the support provided to newly independent nations emerging from postwar decolonization (A Mutual Defense Pact for Besieged States). The system has steadily grown in size, scope, and complexity, spending $21 billion dollars or a third of the UN's budget in 2024.
A champion for systemic change
Beyond its operational role, the UN has also influenced the global financial architecture, although this is a space where it has much less influence than International Financial Institutions (IFIs). In the 1990s, the UN challenged the "Washington Consensus," warning against the systemic risks of globalization and demanding a fairer international economic order (A Tale of Two Agendas). Today, through its work on Financing for Development (FfD), it has ambitions to overhaul the global financial system to make it more resilient, effective, and equitable.
A platform for partnership and for global public goods
As private capital began to eclipse state aid budgets, the UN shifted toward public-private partnerships (Kofi's Fragile Web) and the creation of global public goods (Nothing on Earth). Today, the UN plays a catalytic role in an ecosystem of multistakeholder coalitions, while creating many of the norms and standards that the world runs on, and the scientific and statistical truths that are used to make collective decisions. It also helps create global public goods in health, climate, and other areas.
A goal setter
The UN has become a prolific creator of goals and targets, from its goals for children in the 1990s, to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which expire on December 31, 2030. Goals play a central role in the UN's development playbook, allowing it to influence the strategies and programming of actors at all levels from the global to the local. (Coming soon: our history of the UN and global goals.)
World's Toughest Job: The Complete Podcast
World’s Toughest Job is an eight-part series, co-produced by Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation. Over eight episodes, we examine how the Secretary-General might make a difference on issues including economic turbulence, superpower rivalries, artificial intelligence, inequality, and climate change.
Two | What is the UN Development System?
The United Nations Development System (UNDS) is an umbrella term encompassing UN funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices that have “the promotion of development and the welfare of developing countries” as their primary objective.
There are a lot of these entities — around 44, depending on how you count. They fall into four broad categories:
Funds and programmes: Operational bodies like the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), World Food Programme (WFP), and UN Women.
Specialized agencies: Autonomous intergovernmental organizations with their own governing boards, membership, and assessed budgets, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Labour Organization (ILO), and UNESCO.
Secretariat departments: Central departments responsible for policy analysis and intergovernmental support, such as the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) or UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Regional commissions: Regional bodies — such as the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) — tasked with fostering economic integration and regional policy dialogue.
Managing this sprawling architecture is hard. Responsibility for herding the cats is distributed across three levels, with recent reforms proposing additional coordination at a regional level:
The UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) brings together the executive heads of 38 UN development entities to align policy and strategic direction.
On the ground, the UNDS operates through UN Country Teams (UNCTs), which encompass all UN agencies present in a host nation.
Following the 2018/2019 reforms, UNCTs are led by an independent Resident Coordinator (RC) — the highest-ranking UN development official in-country, reporting directly to the Secretary-General.
Three | The Development Pillar
Over the years, the UN's leadership has tried to bind development to the organization’s other mandates. As Kofi Annan put it:
“We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.”
This framing formalized the so-called “three pillars.” In some ways, development stands alone, due to its political mandate, operational machinery, and funding structures, but its success is linked to other pillars: peace and human rights.
To further complicate matters, the transition from the MDGs to the SDGs marked a shift from development to sustainable development (with its three dimensions: economic, social, environmental), a concept that is itself linked to peace and security (“there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development”).
The 2030 Agenda is rife with promises to deliver its goals in a “universal, indivisible and interlinked” manner. In other words, to implement all 17 goals and 169 targets as a single integrated package in all countries, whatever their income levels. Some critics believe the failure to deliver the SDGs is the result of a failure to escape from siloes. Others, however, argue that integration can lead to paralysis and hinder practical, sector-specific delivery.
For the UNDS at an operational level, the challenge of integration becomes especially important in “crisis-affected countries and their neighbours,” where 70% of all country-level spending is now concentrated (mostly through the humanitarian budget). In these contexts, it believes that progress will only be possible if its development programming is integrated with its work to tackle humanitarian crises, build peace, and secure human rights.
Cross-pillar approaches can be unpopular with Member States, however, due to fears about “securitising development,” the dilution of national sovereignty when conditions are attached to development programs, and the potential for compromising the neutrality of humanitarian workers.
Four | International Development in Crisis
The debate on the future of the UN’s development work is shaped by a broader crisis in the international development system.
1. Money is too tight to mention
After Elon Musk boasted about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” other traditional donors — including France, Germany, and Sweden — used the political cover to cut their own development programs.
Long gone are the days when the UK lectured others about spending 0.7% of its Gross National Income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (ODA). It is now targeting just 0.3%, with “savings” redirected to defense and security spending. Only four countries now meet the 0.7% target (Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden).
Global ODA fell by a record 23.3% in 2025. It is projected to drop by a further 6.9% in 2026 and to keep falling at least until 2028. Many believe we have entered a post-ODA world, asking whether the aid industry is dying, or it is simply on “life support.”
The reaction to the fallout from the ongoing U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict is noteworthy. During past shocks, development finance has surged as donors open the purse strings to help vulnerable countries respond.
In the current emergency, donors say they lack fiscal space to spend more. Some are cannibalizing development budgets to fund emergency humanitarian relief, but there is little new money on the table. That leaves countries exposed to food, fuel, and fertilizer price spikes without access to additional finance.
2. More strings, and less for the poor
As the overall pie shrinks, the flows of funding have also changed.
Grants have been cut more aggressively than loans as development finance flows through IFIs. This brings stricter conditionality and heavier debt burdens for recipient nations.
Poverty eradication was the leading priority in the 1990s and 2000s, but those days are long past. Russia’s invasion transformed Ukraine into the single largest recipient of aid on record, while over a fifth of global ODA (22%) was spent within donor countries in 2023, predominantly on the costs of hosting refugees.
This shift has diverted billions away from the poorest nations, hollowing out programming for health, education, and other core social services, and diverting resources away from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and sub-Saharan Africa.
Bilateral aid to these countries is projected to drop by around 11% in 2026. Humanitarian aid and civil society funding are projected to see cuts of around 40%, while funding for tackling communicable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is projected to drop by more than 50%.
As Western countries retreat, non-traditional donors are playing an increasingly important role in development cooperation, through South-South and “triangular” cooperation, which has potential to inject “trust, equity and ownership into development efforts.”
However much of this emerging assistance remains “invisible in data, not captured by traditional development metrics.” Neither is it structured or scaled to fill the voids in broader development funding that the Western exodus has created.
3. A shifting balance of power
The decline of ODA reflects a fracturing of the political consensus that underpinned international cooperation in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The Global North has turned inward. When traditional donors spend overseas, their aid is increasingly transactional — tied to national security, trade, or migration objectives rather than to poverty reduction.
The United States, for example, has recently promoted a Trade Over Aid Initiative, arguing that it “represents an opportunity to build a development model based on national sovereignty, mutual economic benefit, and the proven success of free-market principles.”
At the same time, countries in the Global South increasingly reject a traditional aid model that is perceived as paternalistic and accused of ignoring national ownership and domestic political choices.
Budget support gained popularity around the turn of the century, as a mechanism for fostering “country ownership,” but may have provided donors with greater influence over domestic policy. Its decline has been associated with a more antagonistic relationship between donors and recipients, and a greater reliance on fragmented project funding.
A further point of friction is the failure to tackle systemic imbalances in the global financial architecture. The Sevilla Commitment — the most recent FfD agreement — focused on overhauling development cooperation, addressing sovereign debt crises, and scaling up investment.
But the agreement was not signed by the United States, which claimed that the proposed reforms interfered with the governance of IFIs (like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and objected to calls for tripling multilateral lending capacity.
Meanwhile, many developing nations and civil society groups felt the final agreement was watered down to reach a consensus. The outcome failed to address “concerns about the undemocratic structure of the international financial architecture” or to tackle issues like the sovereign debt crisis, the need to regulate rating agencies, or the obstacles blocking access to capital markets for countries in the Global South.
Five | UNDS Under Pressure
The last wave of reforms (2018/19) aimed to position the UN development system as a “trusted, reliable, accountable, and effective partner to countries for achieving the 2030 Agenda.”
The UN believes it has largely fulfilled this promise. It reports that more than 90% of governments believe that UN Cooperation Frameworks align with their priorities and that UNDS support is effective.
According to the Secretary-General, this has translated into “more people receiving food assistance; more children gaining access to education; more individuals and families benefitting from social protection; and more national institutions better able to deliver on development.”
Impact has also been delivered at a lower cost, with the UN saying it has exceeded its own targets for efficiency gains. UN entities saved $981.1 million in 2025 “by streamlining services and supply chains, increasing the use of shared services and other measures.”
But while Member States praise the new Resident Coordinator system, they have proved reluctant to fund it, leading to a shortfall of $45.7 million for coordination.
Critics argue that UN’s development work remains fragmented, that it has failed to respond to a rapidly changing external environment, and that it may not be sustainable in the current funding environment.
1. Falling ODA budgets have hit the UN hard
Multilateral ODA fell by 12.7% in 2025 and is projected to fall by 3.4% in 2026. This is the worst drop since 1992-1997 (a period which pushed the international development system towards a renewed focus on poverty reduction and prepared the ground for the MDGs).
The UN saw its core contributions fall by 27% in 2025, with further cuts expected. By 2028, UN funding is projected to remain about 18% lower than when implementation of the SDGs began.
Some donors have partially balanced their cuts to bilateral aid with a shift toward multilateral channels. While bilateral aid to Sub-Saharan Africa fell by 7.2% from 2021-2024, multilateral support grew by 23.4% (but only enough partially to compensate for bilateral donors pulling back).
But this is not benefiting the UN, as donors direct funding as concessional loans through the development banks rather than grants through the UN system. Funding to the World Bank increased by 6.4% in 2025, and regional development banks saw an 11.9% rise (although both are likely to experience cuts in 2026).
This has left UN development actors facing “not a temporary liquidity issue but a structural contraction,” with some agencies losing a third of their core funding.
UN agencies have tried to retrofit their plans for a constrained funding environment, but cuts have often been unplanned and reactive, “skewing priorities toward short-term outputs, inhibiting horizontal collaboration, and undermining oversight and accountability.”
As a result, the UNDS risks being reshaped more by a funding emergency than a long-term strategy for what it is best placed to deliver and where.
2. The financial crisis is increasing fragmentation
In 2024, the UN Funding Compact restated commitments to financing “a more strategic and responsive UN development system.”
Its core promises, however, have not been kept. Member States committed to providing 30% of their voluntary contributions as core funding, but by 2024, more than 90% of funds to some UN agencies were earmarked, often with increasingly “hard” restrictions.
The heavy reliance on project funding works against collaboration, as earmarking “fragments programming and drives competition among entities for donor resources.” As UN entities compete for a slice of a shrinking cake, they are less able to come together to act as a strategic and trusted advisor to the governments they work with.
In a 2025/2026 survey, 58% of host countries say that they view competition among UN entities as unproductive and most disagree that it leads to an increase in overall funding for their country.
Cuts have also rendered the UN’s presence in some countries barely viable, with some country teams having fewer than 50 personnel and many entities maintaining stand-alone offices even though they implement minimal programming.
The funding crisis also undermines the ability of Resident Coordinators to drive strategy and coordination, given they lack financial leverage over agencies that have every incentive to follow edicts from their own headquarters and governing bodies.
In the most recent survey, 65% of UN Country Teams say they have a joint fundraising strategy, but only 44% of Resident Coordinators and 35% of UN Country Team members view these strategies as effective. In most cases, the UN is not able to make a joined-up case for its investment priorities.
Budgets remain overwhelmingly in the control of individual UN entities. Only 31 programme countries channel at least 15% of their non-core development spend through inter-agency pooled funds, while pooled funds receive only 12.4% of non-core funding, well below the target of 30% by 2027 in the Funding Compact.
3. Delivery promises have been broken
Behind the funding crisis lurks the specter of a failure to deliver results that matter to people and societies.
The contrast with the MDGs era is marked. A few years before these goals expired, the UN was in a position to hail “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history” and to hold summits “to accelerate action and get the job done by 2015.”
As the SDGs enter their final phase, the mood music is very different. Just 15% of the 169 targets are on track, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any of the 17 goals will be delivered in full. The SDGs need a rescue mission, more than an acceleration agenda.
Even core poverty objectives are under threat, with the 2030 Agenda pledge to “leave no one behind” largely ignored.
Progress on the elimination of absolute poverty has stalled and will reverse after 2030 on current trends. More than half a billion people are projected to be hungry in 2030, while the number of children out of school has increased for seven years in a row.
This is not, of course, all the UN’s fault, but the failure to deliver the 2030 Agenda could have serious consequences for its future role in development.
In reaction, the UN has tried to find ways of simplifying delivery of the SDGs, launching six “transitions” (spanning food systems, energy, digital connectivity, education, jobs, and climate) at the last SDG Summit in 2023.
The ambition behind these transitions was to move away from siloed projects and towards entry points that could solve the interconnected “Rubik’s cube” of development.
But while the UN can point to some successes — from expanding social protection initiatives and digital learning platforms to the launch of the Global Accelerator on Jobs and Social Protection — the transitions are yet to demonstrate the “catalytic and multiplier effects” that were promised at launch.
Six | UN80 and the UNDS
Through the UN80 Initiative, the Secretary-General has proposed a series of reforms to channel a larger share of the UN’s resources into development results, while positioning the UNDS as a partner to host countries as they deliver the SDGs.
Key proposals include:
Knowledge and technology as an enabler: Rolling out Joint Knowledge Hubs (Work Package 7) — initially on trade and regional integration, productive transformation, and strategic foresight — alongside an Expertise-On-Demand mechanism (WP8) to deploy specialized skills where countries need them most. This would be supported by a Technology-Accelerator Platform (WP15) designed to scale system-wide digital solutions.
Operational integration: Implementing a Unified Services Roadmap (WP14) to integrate the administrative, supply chain, and back-office functions of UN agencies to reduce duplication and costs.
Structural consolidation: Proposed mergers between UNDP and UNOPS, as well as UNFPA and UN Women.
Field-level reconfiguration: Redesigning field presence through more tailored and strategic UN Country Teams (Work Package 5). This includes a “Shared Platform Initiative” to co-locate Resident Coordinators and Humanitarian Coordinators in crisis settings, as well as new Regional Platforms for Integration that bridge the humanitarian, development, peace, and human rights pillars.
RC Funding: Because voluntary contributions and the 1% coordination levy have failed to provide reliable funding for the RCs, the Secretary-General is pushing to fund the system through the regular UN budget. He has also proposed moving from a “one-size-fits-all” structure to configurations tailored for standard, complex, and multi-country settings.
Funding and mandate discipline: Delivering on the Funding Compact’s targets (including the goal to reach 30% core funding), alongside tools for better mandate creation and review under General Assembly resolution 80/251.
Global financial reform: Urging implementation of the Sevilla Commitment, to provide meaningful debt relief to developing nations facing shrinking fiscal space and rising debt.
UN80 has been dominated by a massive row about the mergers, as institutions fight to maintain their independence and their supporters worry about the dilution of their mandates. This has sucked oxygen away from other reforms. Back-end fixes are mostly moving ahead, but the direction of travel on field-level operational shifts remains unclear.
Some believe that UN80 reforms are inevitably facing headwinds because Member States are yet to reach a consensus on strategic questions (“What do we want the UN to deliver on development over the next decade?”).
And even in the best case, UN80 will deliver incremental improvements in the capacity of the UN to deliver its development goals, leaving the bigger strategic challenges to whoever takes over as Secretary-General in 2027.
Seven | The Development Playbook
In Friday’s Regroup Weekly, we will take a first look at the strategic questions awaiting the new Secretary-General. But before zooming out, it helps to look at the calendar and what opportunities it offers the new leader to reposition the UN’s development work:
The Priorities Speech (January 2027): The new SG’s first address to the General Assembly will obviously cover a range of issues, but it is an opportunity to lay out a high-level vision for development and begin generating political momentum for the SDG Summit.
UN80 Implementation (ongoing): Behind the scenes, the new SG will inherit the implementation of the UN80 reforms, and probably an ongoing struggle to reach agreement on the most contentious proposals.
Annual Development Report (Spring 2027): Each year, through the QCPR process, the SG presents an annual overview of the UN development system’s transformation. While data in the 2027 report will be largely already locked in, this is a platform for the new administration to signal priorities for system-wide reform.
SDG Summit (September 2027): The High-level Political Forum (HLPF) in July paves the way for the final quadrennial SDG Summit. Heads of State will convene to squeeze whatever progress they can out of the 2030 Agenda in its last three years. They will also probably trigger the intergovernmental process of designing the post-2030 agenda.
QCPR Review (Spring 2028): The SG publishes the comprehensive report for the four-year QCPR cycle. This is the administration’s opportunity to set the agenda and propose the operational machinery needed for the next decade.
QCPR Resolution (December 2028): The General Assembly will adopt the 2028 QCPR resolution. If successful, the new SG will gain a mandate to close out the 2030 Agenda and lock in a modernized structure for the UN’s work in development in the late 2020s and early 2030s.
What’s Coming Next
This Friday’s [Re]Group Weekly: The strategic questions awaiting the next Secretary-General as they navigate the future of UN development.
Coming Soon: Our deep dive into the history of the UN and global goals
How You Can Help
If you found this primer useful, please forward it to colleagues. Because this is a living guide, we want your input: Tell us what we’ve missed or what we’ve got wrong so we can keep strengthening it.