The United Nations has weathered many international crises and evolved considerably since its inception 80 years ago. However, 2025 presents a particular challenge. In the last year, the UN’s major donors have reduced their aid budgets and the UN80 Initiative was launched, promising to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and “better [serve] people whose very lives depend on [the system]”.
Both Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the Chair of the UN80 Task Force Guy Ryder have touted UN80 as an opportunity to strengthen the system, insisting that it is separate from the aid cuts. But restricted finances are already resulting in the suspension of programming and significant job losses; this will of course shape the reform process.
UN80 has three workstreams: internal efficiency and effectiveness; mandate implementation; and structural changes. All have reform proposals which were discussed during UNGA; Member States will be further briefed on by Guterres this week, on October 15. This blog will focus on the second workstream, with two future blogs focused on the other workstreams.
The road to UN80
The UN system is no stranger to reform. Its funds, programs, specialised agencies, departments, offices, and related organisations emerged and evolved at key moments, driven and shaped by the political prerogatives of the Member States which govern them. But systemic reform has remained elusive, hindered by inadequate political will, limited resources, and mandates that are narrowly defined.
In 2020, UNGA asked Guterres to develop a forward-looking agenda to revitalise multilateralism. The resultant “Pact for the Future”, adopted in 2024, largely reaffirmed existing mandates. Yet by the time it was published, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s campaign in Gaza had prompted a global increase in defense spending at the expense of aid budgets. In March 2025, Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher announced the Humanitarian Reset, calling for simplification of the humanitarian system, pooling of resources, and decentralisation of operations. The next day, Guterres launched the UN80 Initiative.
Tensions between the urgent aspirations and demands of the UN system; the fact it has been chronically underfunded for years; the current budgetary reality; and the political priorities of donor countries are now producing a haphazard brew. All parts of the UN system are under review, and there are numerous “power holders” who can influence the process. UN staff have been voicing concerns of the incoherence of the process in the face of mounting job cuts at junior levels.
The shifting implementation of mandates
Mandates—requests or directives for action issued by UNGA, the Security Council, and the Economic and Social Council—are at the core of what drives the UN. The UN80 process has identified nearly 40,000 mandates in need of review. For example, Table 1 outlines the various organisations involved in a humanitarian response, and how their mandates have increasingly overlapped.
Table 1. The mandate evolution of key humanitarian and migration agencies
| | Agency | Mandate evolution |
|---|
Food | Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) | FAO, established in 1945, is mandated to defeat hunger and achieve global food and nutrition security while preserving the planet’s resources and reducing the environmental impact. | They have increasingly become involved in humanitarian contexts, aiming to boost food production, deliver cash-based transfers, and support environmental rehabilitation. |
| World Food Programme (WFP) | WFP was originally established on an experimental basis in 1961, primarily to meet emergency food needs, and to assist in pre-school and school feeding. | They are now the largest humanitarian organisation, providing food and relief items to populations, and logistics support for other organisations in crisis settings. |
Refugees | UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) | UNHCR was established following World War II, guardian of the 1951 Refugee Convention, including the core principle of non-refoulement, as well as basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees. | Over time, their mandate has been expanded to include stateless persons, asylum-seekers, and returnees. |
| United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) | UNRWA was established in 1949 with a mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees, displaced persons, and their descendants in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. | Since their inception, the registered refugee population has more than quadrupled, and the emphasis shifted from humanitarian relief to human development. |
Migrants | International Organization for Migration (IOM) | IOM originated as more of a logistics organisation, tasked with helping move migrants in the 1950s, in the aftermath of World War II. Outside of the UN system till 2016, the IOM is now a related organisation to the UN. | IOM activities span human mobility, supporting migrants and displaced people in different settings including refugee resettlement. It also assists with voluntary returns. |
Coordination |
| Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) | IASC is the oldest and highest-level humanitarian coordination forum, bringing together the leaders of 19 organisations to coordinate and strategise responses to humanitarian crises. The IASC is chaired by the Emergency Relief Coordinator, who is also the head of OCHA. |
| Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Lead Coordinators | OCHA was first established in 1992 as the Department of Humanitarian Affairs and evolved in 1998. OCHA’s mandate includes coordination of humanitarian response; policy development; and humanitarian advocacy. At the global level, this is primarily conducted through the IASC. | In refugee responses, UNHCR is the lead coordinator under the Refugee Coordination Model. In mixed migration settings, UNHCR and IOM co-lead. |
As can be seen, UN agencies’ mandates have shifted considerably over time, with some agencies now in competition with each other. So why have these overlaps occurred? There are four drivers to consider. Firstly, new and evolving crises are triggering programmatic shifts. For example, climate change has caused multiple agencies to move beyond their original mandates, delivering programming for disaster response and protection for the increasing numbers of climate displaced. Secondly, the increasing numbers of people in need in complex and protracted crises are blurring the lines between humanitarian and development programming and mandates. Thirdly, institutional incentives to maintain strategic relevance foster innovation and expansion.
Finally, many of these overlaps can be attributed to donor behavior and financing. UN agencies are, in effect, incentivised to go beyond their mandate and deliver additional programs in order to receive further funding. Donors have increasingly “earmarked” multilateral contributions, tying them to specific crises, agencies, geographies, or programs (by comparison, only 13 percent of funding is unearmarked). Agencies complain this increases programme costs and distorts priorities, and studies have found that earmarking can lead to mission creep and agencies taking work outside their core competencies.
Resets, reforms, and reports
The UN80 Initiative’s mandate implementation workstream published their report in early August, arguing that earmarking “often hinder[s] maximum impact and can exacerbate existing challenges for program fragmentation”. Recommendations include reducing earmarking (as committed in the 2019 Funding Compact) and allowing UN agencies “greater flexibility to redeploy resources quickly with reasonable justification, including to protect essential country-level delivery from funding cuts”.
The Humanitarian Reset also seeks to address the high levels of earmarked funding, urging the use of existing mechanisms such as pooled funding and the emergency fund (CERF). But this approach has proved difficult to change as donors, subject to domestic and legislative pressures, prefer to control allocations in line with their priorities.
There are also concerns over the lack of open consultation, and that some of the changes proposed by UN80 would throw into doubt key points of the Humanitarian Reset, happening in parallel. The humanitarian system had already introduced scoping measures in part to cope with budgetary pressures when the reset was announced.
In an era of shrinking funds, as donors are increasingly pushing the aid system to do more with less, it is important that the remaining donor funding has as much impact as possible. Within such constraints, system reform becomes a limited effort to control damage from the loss of resources, rather than a positive agenda to advance assistance as a global public good. In order to see real progress, donors must first be willing to shift how they fund.
