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The UN as a Platform for Complex Global Shocks
Four Takeaways from Episode 7 of our podcast, 'World’s Toughest Job'
This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: Can the UN act as the emergency platform the world needs?
The UN was built to manage emergencies that happen in one place or one sector — health, food, refugees, peacekeeping. But the crises of the 21st century do not respect those boundaries. A conflict sparks an energy shock, which triggers a debt crisis, which leads to hunger, which creates conditions for further conflict. As the world faces this era of fast-moving global shocks, the UN’s traditional machinery is often too slow and fragmented to respond effectively.
The episode begins with the 2008 global food crisis. Josette Sheeran, then head of the World Food Programme, watched as spiking oil prices, biofuel subsidies, and financial panic created a “silent tsunami” that suddenly priced millions of people out of the market for basic sustenance.
To manage the fallout, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon bypassed standard protocols, pulling together a fractured international system into a unified task force to tackle the emergency on multiple fronts simultaneously. The task force recognized that throwing emergency aid at a country is not enough; the structural factors that caused the food to become unaffordable in the first place needed to be addressed. Read about that history here.
Today, complex, cascading crises — where a shock in one sector rapidly spreads to others — have become the new normal. On past trends, the next Secretary-General will face at least one while in office.
In this episode, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host Mark Malloch-Brown are joined by an expert panel to discuss whether the next Secretary-General should try to build a standardized “operating system” for global emergencies, or whether, as in 2008, the UN is better off building makeshift coalitions when an emergency occurs.
Here’s what Martin Griffiths, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; Sigrid Kaag, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the Netherlands and former UN Under-Secretary-General for missions in Syria and Lebanon; and Aarathi Krishnan, Founder and CEO of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, had to say.
1. Political diplomacy must lead over the “humanitarian comfort zone.”
While the UN’s crisis management has evolved to handle complex shocks, the international community often still defaults to treating these emergencies as purely humanitarian problems.
Sigrid Kaag warned against treating a “profoundly political security … crisis through the lens of a ‘Humanitarian Plus’ agenda.” Doing so provides a political comfort zone for Member States, she argued, allowing them to do no harm to their own reputations because it is hard to argue against humanitarian action. But by reducing complex wars to logistical problems, Member States avoid making difficult choices. When those crises inevitably drag on, Kaag noted, the UN becomes the “favorite go-to place to blame when [Member States] want to be shielded from any political responsibility, let alone accountability.”
Martin Griffiths echoed this sentiment, recalling his frustration when UN Security Council members would ask how they could assist his humanitarian efforts. Why don’t you do your job, which is peace and security, he would reply, rather than expecting wars to be ended by humanitarians who could serve as “a mitigating factor at best.”
For the UN to be effective, panelists argued that the next Secretary-General must prioritize risk-embracing political diplomacy. “Mediators and political diplomats, largely absent from the UN in recent times, have got to be at the front edge,” Griffiths said.
Pointing to the 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative, he emphasized that this kind of successful risk-taking improvisation cannot be delegated. Especially for peace and security, leadership needs to come from the top. Kaag agreed, reflecting on her mission to remove chemical weapons from Syria. Direct involvement from the Secretary-General, she noted, “cut out all the nonsense that could happen within bureaucracies” and provided the “latitude, full trust, and also the backup that you need when you’re dealing with uncharted terrain.”
Griffiths framed the dilemma for the next Secretary-General: “Do you not take action because it’s too risky and therefore forfeit any opportunity to do some good? Or do you take a risk and get out there?”
2. Overcoming the institutional ‘fear factor’ to anticipate crises.
In a complex crisis, we have argued that the UN must act as a conductor capable of directing a networked response to threats that cross sectors and geographies.
While the UN monitors a vast array of global data, Aarathi Krishnan argued that the multilateral system struggles to synthesize this information into actionable foresight. In her view, the UN too often reacts to headlines rather than shifting underlying conditions, failing to connect the dots on medium-term indicators. She suggested that the system misses the interconnections and domino effects of converging vulnerabilities such as sovereign debt, energy prices, or bilateral tech deals while ultimately waiting for the shock to arrive rather than preparing for it.
This fragmented landscape raises the premium for analytical foresight. Krishnan observed that states are increasingly retreating into “transactional sovereignty” — abandoning the pursuit of global common goods to make deal-by-deal choices based on immediate self-interest. The UN is falling back on the playbooks of the past, she said. It “assumes that Member States can come together, that ultimately every party wants the same thing, and that’s not true anymore,” she said.
The root cause of this analytical blindness, according to the panelists, is an internal culture that punishes honesty. Kaag diagnosed a paralyzing “fear factor” within the UN system. “A lot of analytical pieces never get written,” she said, noting that truth-telling is instead relegated to the corridors — “the worst form of governance.” By keeping vital warnings off the record, leaders are deprived of the filtered analysis they need to act preemptively.
Mark Malloch-Brown agreed that this type of informality is common in public administration and noted that it is especially damaging at the global level. The tendency of Member States to punish rigorous analysis leaves the system flying blind when it most needs a clear picture of the horizon. The UN needs to ask hard questions, he said, but putting the answers on paper causes a backlash.
3. The UN must abandon the 1960s model and embrace multipolarity.
A recurring theme throughout the episode was the misconception that the UN must be the sole actor capable of resolving global emergencies. When asked if a wealthy nation such as the Netherlands turns to the UN when a predictable crisis occurs, Kaag, a former Dutch minister, was blunt: “No.” Instead, she noted that her government had looked more to the European Union, the European Central Bank, or other regional institutions, turning to the UN primarily for “the normative side” and global standards.
Malloch-Brown agreed that not every problem needs to come to the UN. He advocated for a global “subsidiarity network” where specific crises can be managed at a regional level or by specialized coalitions that are best placed to handle them. Kaag agreed, arguing that the international community often projects an outdated “decolonization model” onto the UN, acting “as if it’s still in the ‘60s, and it’s the only place in town where everything needs to happen.” Instead, she pointed to the rise of multipolarity and alternative alliances, calling a decentralized approach “healthy.”
Krishnan noted that alternative problem-solving architectures are already forming outside of formal global governance. Because actors recognize “where power is shifting,” she observed new alliances emerging such as aid initiatives funded by private philanthropy and designed by corporate consulting firms. Krishnan warned that when states and private actors believe that the UN is no longer equipped to lead, they are bypassing the multilateral system to build their own mechanisms.
However, Malloch-Brown provided a crucial caveat regarding the rise of this decentralized “minilateralism.” He warned that ad hoc coalitions become dangerous when they drift away from foundational principles. The UN Charter, he noted, is still the “fundamental road map” for navigating global shocks. Without the UN acting as a normative platform to anchor these agile networks, informal coalitions risk delivering “a much uglier realpolitik solution.”
For Malloch-Brown, the ultimate goal of the UN is not to exert total operational control but to “put power within a framework of norms and values.”
4. The debate over how to manage crises: systems versus people.
Given the complexity outlined above, the UN’s role as an orchestrator of a response to a complex shock has become both more important and far more difficult, which is why Secretary-General António Guterres proposed the creation of a UN Emergency Platform.
This was not intended to be a new bureaucracy, but rather a set of pre-agreed protocols that would break down institutional silos and make it easier to mount a whole-of-system response. The proposal requested standing authority to trigger a modular mechanism that would bring together a bespoke mix of Member States, financial institutions, and private sector actors tailored to the specific crisis at hand.
However, Member States pushed back ahead of the 2024 Summit of the Future. Fearing an executive power grab and duplication of existing mandates, governments watered down the concept in the Pact for the Future. While recognizing the need for the UN to be at the heart of “a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks,” they refused to grant the Secretary-General any new authority and insisted that responses operate within existing bodies.
On the podcast, this tension between formal structures and improvisation sparked a debate. Krishnan supported the idea of an emergency platform, noting that currently, the UN is forced to innovate and create everything from scratch in each crisis. For long-term sustainability, she argued, crisis management “cannot rely just on individual people that are known.” Instead, the system needs a “concerted, structured way” to track and respond to converging shocks.
However, Griffiths and Kaag expressed skepticism about the idea. “I’m not at all in favor of new platforms or committees,” Griffiths said, fearing it would add to the UN’s bloat. Kaag warned that the UN is already prone to letting bureaucracy rule. She recalled field missions where headquarters staff complained she wasn’t following the manual or filling out required charts and matrices — paperwork that had nothing to do with the political reality on the ground.
Instead of a formal platform, Griffiths and Kaag emphasized the importance of the crisis leader. “I wouldn’t worry about an emergency platform, but I’d worry about people,” Griffiths argued. He pointed out that as Secretary-General, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon each had a roster of heavyweights they could deploy to cut through the noise and drive a response.
Whether the UN adopts pre-agreed crisis protocols or continues to improvise, the panel agreed that successfully orchestrating a response in this fragmented environment ultimately hinges on deploying individuals with the “tested leadership experience” and political weight to get things done.
Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.