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In last week's primer, we mapped the crisis in the UN development system. Today, we turn to the choices facing the incoming UN Secretary-General. Think of it as a Rubik’s Cube: a puzzle with six faces, where twisting any single side inevitably shifts all the rest.
Four of them describe the UN’s “product portfolio”: (1) how it sets global goals and norms; (2) its systemic and catalytic role; (3) the platform it provides for multi-stakeholder partnerships; and (4) its operational role in the field.
The other two faces are enablers of delivery: (5) how the system is configured and (6) the political and financial direction it receives.
The current wave of UN80 reforms focus heavily on the enablers. But without a shared vision of what the UN should deliver, they have become bogged down in process, in the “how” rather than the “why” and the “what.”
To give you a sense of what’s at stake on these strategic questions, here’s my take on the state of the debate, starting with the first face of the cube: how the UN sets global goals and norms.
Face 1: Goals and Norms
Goal-setting is one of the UN’s primary levers for normative influence, with former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailing the Millennium Development Goals as triggering “the most successful poverty reduction movement in history,” and for having “reshaped decision-making in developed and developing countries alike.”
The 2030 Agenda has not replicated this success. None of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and just 25 of the targets are likely to be delivered by 2030. Even when a target is on track, we often lack robust evidence that it has bent the curve in a significant way.
Designing a replacement goal framework will be high on the new Secretary-General’s to-do list in 2027, as Heads of State convene in New York for the final SDG Summit in September. Four options are floating around for a successor to the 2030 Agenda:
More of the same. Roll over the existing goals. This is the path of least resistance, and in my view, the most likely outcome.
Update and expand. Add new goals to reflect emerging priorities like AI governance. It’s true that the world has changed since 2015, but do we really need more than 17 goals?
Less is more. Cut the list down to focus on critical priorities. This fits the need for focus, but intergovernmental negotiations rarely produce simpler outcomes.
A graceful exit. Accept that the Global Goals era is over (an outcome that could happen by default if intergovernmental negotiations deadlock).
When work started on the design of the 2030 Agenda, Ban Ki-moon played an active role by appointing a High-Level Panel to produce a first draft of the SDGs. The next Secretary-General must decide early whether to make similar efforts to shape the debate, or whether to leave the argument to Member States.
To ground this decision, the new leadership team needs historical analysis of where, how, and why Global Goals have added value to national policy making. Otherwise, we will continue to treat goals as if they were magic spells, hoping that if diplomats write a promise on paper, it will conjure change in the real world.
Face 2: A Systemic and Catalytic Role
Many countries no longer value standalone development projects. Instead, they want the UN to play a systemic and catalytic role. This can mean:
Rewriting the rules of the game. The UN uses its legitimacy and convening power to address gaps in the sovereign debt architecture, scrutinize credit rating agencies, reform international taxation, or give the Global South more power in global economic governance. The Sevilla Commitment from the Fourth Financing for Development Conference gives the UN a mandate to play this role.
Navigating existing rules. The UN acts as a strategic adviser to host governments, helping them strengthen institutions, mobilize domestic resources, and attract international capital. This positions the Resident Coordinator (RC) as a deal broker, aligning multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and private investors behind a country-led development plan.
Generating global public goods (GPGs). The UN helps safeguard the operating systems on which economies depend. It acts as a “single source of truth” for understanding systemic risk, establishes the standards and regulations that enable interoperability, and provides the framework for collective action in domains like climate, health security, and AI.
The UN has potential in each of these roles, but it also faces pushback. It has long had aspirations to rewrite the rules of global economic governance, but many Western countries resist moves into territory they believe belongs to the G20, OECD, and International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Its track record is therefore restricted to worthy, but modest, initiatives such as the new Borrowers’ Platform, which provides a forum for countries to share debt management strategies, but will not push for debt restructuring.
When it comes to navigating existing rules, the UN’s funding model undermines its ambitions, as UN agencies compete against one another for resources rather than collaborating on the bigger picture. RCs often lack the tools, budgets, and specialized teams to help governments design bankable SDG investment projects, tap private capital, rewrite tax frameworks, and restructure debt. And the UN’s six transitions (launched at the 2023 SDG Summit) are yet to meet their promise to deliver investment at the scale needed to drive SDG acceleration.
Demand for global public goods is high, but the UN’s ability to generate them is constrained by geopolitical gridlock. In health and climate, consensus-based treaty-making is largely stalled, while traditional, government-led regulatory models fall short when it comes to borderless frontiers like AI. A new Secretary-General will not get early wins by championing GPGs in the abstract. They will need to identify breakthrough opportunities and build the alliances needed to exploit them.
In their first year, a new Secretary-General will face a flashpoint as negotiations culminate on a proposed UN tax convention (with a zero draft revealing predictable divides about its ambition and scope). They are also scheduled to convene a second biennial summit for the UN, G20, and IFIs to coordinate global economic policy. Debt, capital flows, and IFI governance will be among the tricky issues on the agenda. And they will need to decide how much political capital to spend on proposals to put the RC system on a more sustainable financial footing.
Face 3: The Coalition Builder
With Western aid budgets falling, some believe the UN should slim down its operational role and become a platform for partnerships instead. This is consistent with the growing reliance on minilateral groups, regional clubs, and issue-based coalitions in an age when formal multilateral frameworks are often blocked.
It also fits with the refrain that the UN must pivot from making goals to enabling their delivery. But this is not new advice: we are in year seven of a so-called “decade of action and delivery” that was launched at the SDG Summit in 2019. When so many delivery promises have been made and then forgotten over the past decade, you would be wise to be skeptical when you hear a new one.
The SDGs have had a partnership goal from day 1, while the UN created a Partnership Accelerator to drive “systems shifts” on the 2030 Agenda. But although impressive SDG-era partnerships certainly exist, any audit would conclude that the UN has failed to persuade others to unleash the energy, capital, and innovation at a scale that matches its “supremely ambitious” development agenda.
At least in part, this is a problem of culture. Successful platforms create the shared connectivity and standards that allow “fluid alliances” to work together to solve complex problems. But that requires lowering organizational boundaries, something that the UN’s territorial development actors struggle to do. They have throttled as many partnerships as they have accelerated, and have often launched UN-branded initiatives instead of elevating collaborations that others are best placed to lead.
To make this pivot, the new leadership team needs an analysis of what a “multilateralism-as-platform” model would look like in practice. That means extracting lessons from global platform businesses and innovative public sector models, alongside a learn-from-the-winners review of the SDG partnerships that delivered the most impressive results.
For a new Secretary-General, next year’s SDG Summit offers a final opportunity to convene an “army of doers” for the 2030 Agenda’s home stretch and its post-2030 successor. But that would only be the prelude to a deeper overhaul of culture, incentives, and strategy that would turn the UN into a platform for coalition-building. Once again, not a simple task.
Face 4: Operational Delivery
The fourth face of the Rubik’s Cube is where the money is largely spent: operational delivery in-country.
Some argue that it is time to sunset the UN’s operational role, stepping back so that domestic ministries, private capital, multilateral development banks, and grassroots organizations can take the lead on implementation.
I have sympathy for this view. If the UN wants to create the rules, provide the stadium, and referee the game, it is inevitably going to face resistance when it invades the pitch and tramples over other players in the scramble for project funding.
If the UN is going to shrink its operational role, its footprint must follow. The UN80 reforms call this moving toward a “tailored” country presence. But a new Secretary-General will find that “tailoring” is a polite euphemism for the work of restructuring or closing country offices where the UN no longer needs a physical presence.
But a full withdrawal is not on the table. With roughly 70% of the UN’s development and humanitarian budgets already concentrated in fragile and crisis-affected settings, the gravitational pull on the UN’s field presence is strong. Expect an ongoing shift to places where:
Poverty is increasingly concentrated, institutions are weakest, and population growth remains strong.
Risks are highest and regional or global spillovers are most damaging.
The UN has comparative advantage as a delivery mechanism of choice, given that multilateral development banks and private actors struggle to spend money unless the UN plays a de-risking role.
But this shift risks forcing the UN into a trap. By concentrating its footprint in the world’s most difficult environments, it could be reduced to a subcontractor of last resort, spending other people’s money, bound by their rules, and accountable for results in places where they are incredibly hard to deliver.
There are two ways out of this trap. First, a new leadership team will have to confront the decades-long failure to get the UN’s development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding arms to deliver as one. If its comparative advantage in operational delivery lies in preventing conflict, building resilience, and supporting development in the world’s most dangerous places, that only holds if it brings all relevant tools to bear.
Second, the new leadership team will have to resurrect the prevention agenda that the current Secretary-General championed in his early years, but then abandoned. In 2018, the UN and World Bank’s joint framework for prevention (which I helped create) drove home the need for sustained engagement in the institutional reforms and social cohesion that are a counterweight to short-term firefighting.
That message still resonates. After all, the point of development isn’t to respond to emergencies, but to support societies strong enough to withstand them.
Twisting the Cube
It is when we move from the what to the how of Face 5 (the UN’s institutional configuration) and Face 6 (its politics and funding) that the Rubik’s Cube bites back.
Depending on their priorities for Faces 1–4, a new Secretary-General will need a different configuration across the UN Development System’s untamed ecosystem of funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices.
To make global goals matter again (Face 1), you need political skill, diplomatic heft, and intergovernmental savvy. To catalyze systemic change (Face 2), you need to upgrade your strategic, research, and technical functions. To build a platform for partnerships (Face 3), you need champions who can turn the UN into a low-friction space for others to work in. And to support fragile states (Face 4), you need integrated strategies combined with world-class logistical capacity and field-level operational strength.
Twist the cube to align one face, and you scramble the others.
If the UN were a multinational corporation, a new CEO would throw some money at a big management consultancy to set out all the options, spend a few weeks getting the board to make a decision, and then start the restructuring on a Monday morning. For better or worse, it would be done — redundancies and all — by the weekend.
But the UN doesn’t have shareholders. It’s an intergovernmental club. That means no Secretary-General can simply choose what makes the most strategic sense. They have to figure out what the political and funding environment will allow. Dedicate time to strengthening their license to operate. And encourage like-minded coalitions to generate the demand signals to which they can respond.
But all of that requires Member States to know what they want, debate their differences, and set a clear direction. Which might be the hardest puzzle of all.
