Related to a recent ReformWorks analysis the 2025 UN staffing cuts this article probes the institutional shocks across the system, driven by sudden donor funding crises rather than strategic planning. As retirees, we know that cutting headcount is not the same as cutting bureaucracy.
While spreadsheets capture immediate salary savings, they fail to track the invisible loss of institutional memory. Without the experienced staff who know how the machinery actually functions, the UN risks repeating old mistakes and damaging key relationships.
Reducing staff by 10% to 20% while keeping 100% of the old, multi-layered approval processes does not create efficiency. It simply makes the remaining, overworked staff miserable. To protect its mission, the UN must stop just moving boxes on an organigram and ensure that a smaller UN actually becomes a smarter, flatter, and better UN.
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The cuts were not the result of a carefully considered reform programme. They were forced on the UN by abrupt and often arbitrary reductions in funding, driven largely by the political shift to the right in major donor countries. The same senior managers who expanded UN structures when money was plentiful are now responsible for shrinking them.
ReplyDeleteThe result was entirely predictable: people protected themselves.
The cuts have not dismantled bureaucracy. They have largely protected the upper levels of each agency while pushing the pain downwards. Younger staff, field staff and those on less secure contracts are the easiest to remove. Senior officials, entrenched managers and the layers of administration surrounding them are much harder to dislodge. Many of those making the decisions need only preserve their positions until retirement. What happens afterwards will no longer be their problem.
It is therefore misleading to present the loss of “institutional memory” as the central danger. Much of the accumulated bureaucracy is itself part of the problem. The real question is whose knowledge is being lost and whose positions are being protected. If experienced operational staff disappear while senior management structures and cumbersome approval systems survive, the UN will retain the bureaucracy and lose the competence.
A smaller organisation governed by the same hierarchy, procedures, incentives and people is not a reformed organisation. It is simply the same organisation with fewer people doing the useful work.
Genuine UN reform will not be designed and enforced by those who benefited from building the present system and now control the cuts. It will have to be imposed, managed and monitored from outside, principally by member states and major donors. That is not happening.
What we are witnessing is not a smarter, flatter and more effective UN. It is an institution protecting its top while sacrificing its future.
Real UN reform will require a reduction of agencies involved in development and humanitarian aid. The current competition among agencies for funding does not propel excellency, but lead to excessive bureaucracy and limited effectiveness. UNICEF should focus on promoting Child Rights based public policies and justice as well as as lifesaving interventions for children in emergencies.
ReplyDeleteFor many decades, Sweden was a strong defender of the international order built around the United Nations. It promoted multinationalism, international solidarity, generous development assistance and the idea that universal rights should restrain governments even when politically inconvenient. Few countries embraced the Convention on the Rights of the Child more enthusiastically.
ReplyDeleteThat era appears to be ending.
Swedish development assistance has been reduced and redirected. Long-standing programmes have been closed and support to several UN organisations has come under pressure. International commitments no longer enjoy the political protection they once did.
The change is not confined to money. The Swedish Parliament has just lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14. The decision marks a retreat from Sweden’s previous understanding of children’s rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child specifically urged Sweden to retain the age of 15. Sweden ignored them. When one of the Convention’s strongest supporters is prepared to step back from the standard it once defended, something has gone wrong.
Sweden is not alone. Many rich countries around the world are cutting aid, questioning international conventions and treating UN agencies with growing suspicion. Some of this may be populism, but it is also the consequence of the UN’s own failures, such as flawed bureaucracy, corruption, weak accountability and selective moral outrage.
Can the UN, with this background, be saved?
Perhaps, but it will not be saved by asking taxpayers to finance an ever-expanding bureaucracy, nor by invoking conventions as sacred texts while ignoring the insecurity that causes public support for them to collapse. The UN could be saved if it returns to its essential purposes: peace, fundamental rights and practical international cooperation. Its conventions must command respect because they are credible, consistently applied and compatible with the duty of states to protect their citizens.
Sweden’s retreat should be seen as a warning. If even Sweden is losing confidence, the problem is not confined to populists or hostile governments.
Whoa - I am already being attacked by email. Let me try to explain myself. I primarily had, in my comment, the Refugee Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in mind.
DeleteThe basic principle of the Refugee Convention remains essential. But it was not designed for today’s mass migration, organised smuggling, movement through several safe countries and asylum systems offering very different benefits. It can not be defended in its present form and needs urgent updating to reflect today's realities.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child remains equally important. But its interpretation must take account of reality. Gangs in Sweden recruit children to commit murder because children cannot be punished. The UN urged Sweden to retain the age of criminal responsibility, but offered no answer to that reality or to the rights of victims and other children who need protection.
There is also selective application. Attacks on civilians, arbitrary imprisonment and denial of self-determination are strongly condemned in some cases and largely ignored in others.
I am not arguing that the conventions should be abandoned. Their fundamental principles remain valid. But they must be made to reflect present realities and be applied consistently to prevent losing even more public support and further eroding the UN's standing.
The United Nations must accept a share of the blame for the migration crisis.
DeleteThe refugee conventions were written for a different age. Over time, however, the distinction between refugees and economic migrants became increasingly blurred. Large numbers crossed several safe countries before applying for asylum in whichever country appeared to offer the most lenient conditions and the best economic prospects.
Yet the UN system defended the conventions while ignoring how circumstances had changed. It resisted restrictions, criticised countries seeking tighter controls and treated attempts at reform as a denial of human rights.
The consequences were predictable. Countries that followed the outdated rules carried disproportionate financial and social costs. Governments lost control. Public confidence collapsed. Political divisions widened, and parties once considered extreme gained support.
The UN may not have created the crisis, and European governments made serious mistakes of their own. But the UN helped preserve a system that no longer distinguished between genuine refugees and economic migrants.
That failure has harmed both the UN and the institution of asylum. When voters conclude that the system is being abused, they do not merely turn against illegal migration. They become less willing to protect genuine refugees as well.
Sweden is a convenient country for the UN to criticise. It submits its reports, answers the questions, pays its contributions, and takes UN criticism seriously.
DeleteAlmost every country in the world has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Many violate it to a degree that makes Sweden’s decision to lower the age of criminal responsibility seem minor. Children are forced into marriage and labour, denied education, imprisoned with adults, recruited into armed groups, trafficked, mutilated and killed. The CRC Committee criticises such countries, but nothing happens. The Committee has no power to compel compliance.
Sweden’s case also contains a contradiction that the UN appears unwilling to confront. Gang violence and the recruitment of children into criminal networks are disproportionately concentrated in communities of refugee/migrant background. Sweden’s exceptionally large and poorly managed refugee migration, followed by failed integration policies, helped create the environments in which these gangs flourished.
Swedish governments bear the primary responsibility. But the UN cannot wash its hands of the outcome. For decades it defended an increasingly expansive interpretation of the 1951 Refugee Convention, resisted tighter national controls and treated movement through safe countries, people-smuggling and the growing overlap between asylum and economic migration with little concern. Sweden followed the UN and accepted numbers of refugees/migrants it proved unable to manage.
The consequences now include criminal gangs that recruit children to carry weapons, plant bombs and commit murder precisely because the CRC-influenced law treated them as too young to be punished. That reality forced Sweden to reconsider its age of criminal responsibility.
The UN then criticised Sweden for doing so.
The UN defended a refugee system that contributed to the problem, yet objects when Sweden changes its laws to confront one of the consequences. The UN invokes the rights of young offenders but offers no answer concerning the rights of their victims, or the rights of families living amid shootings and bombings.
The result is a perverse system. The countries most willing to comply are subjected to pressure, while the worst offenders suffer no meaningful consequences.
Sweden is not above criticism; neither is the UN. Universal rights require universal standards; UN organisations that demand that conventions are followed must also accept responsibility when their interpretations contribute to consequences they failed to foresee.
The UN system is shedding thousands of people through restructuring, funding cuts and normal turnover. Smaller is not reform. Every year, substantial numbers also retire. Yet the discussion about “lost institutional memory” is often remarkably uncritical.
ReplyDeleteThese “retrenchments” are a mixed bag. Some people take irreplaceable operational experience with them. Others take away accumulated bureaucracy in the form of procedures, habits, layers and institutional baggage that nobody particularly misses. The real test is simple: what happens when they leave? If nobody notices, perhaps what was lost was not institutional memory but institutional habit.
And then there is the familiar UN paradox: someone retires, their post disappears, and a little later the organisation finds a way to bring them back as a consultant. The salary line is gone; the dependency remains.
The present cuts therefore raise a much bigger question than how many posts are being abolished.
What is actually being removed?
If experienced field people and operational capacity are lost while management layers, administrative machinery and duplicated functions survive, the UN will have achieved retrenchment without reform.
UN80 is attempting genuine consolidation and restructuring, including reducing duplication and shrinking the Secretariat workforce. That is necessary. But the real test is whether it changes how the system works, not simply how many people it employs.
The UN does not need to preserve institutional memory indiscriminately. It needs to preserve institutional competence. And it needs to have the courage to distinguish the two.
A smaller UN is not necessarily a better UN. If the bureaucracy survives while the people who deliver the work disappear, it may simply be a weaker UN. (Sikander Khan)
Well said Sikander! The revolving door of staff who retire and then bring back their wisdom as a consultant is one of the more tiring plays in the tired playbook. I worked with several of them - and it is a double edged sword. Sometimes they bring in some wisdom, they bring in familiarity, and they bring in the some of the old tired processes that we thought we had moved away from. Many years ago, I was at a duty station where we had a consultant in a very senior position as OIC for 11 months--to fill in a gap that took a long time to fill. At the very end the consultant, who is not a staff but performed pure staff functions (which is NOT what they are hired to do by our own rules) dumped a huge e-mail with over 20 new SOPs we were to follow--it was a deliverable. Then the post was filled and the new person's first move was to inform us that we do not need these SOPs, there are old hand me down processes, and they were put in the bin. We really need to change in a fundamental way if we want to reform internally as UNICEF and in the wider UN system.
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