More than funding, the UN needs restructuring

The United Nations is broke. According to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the institution can’t pay its bills. Members, such as the US, haven’t paid their dues. The UN doesn’t just face a liquidity crisis. An old rule obliges it to pay members back for unspent money, even from dues it never received. The UN Secretariat and some major operations could close by July.The UN is far from ideal. The secretariat and agency headquarters are massive bureaucracies, the General Assembly is widely derided as a talk shop and the Security Council is an arena for great powers to advance their national interests.Reports on the impact of the UN’s potential collapse have focused more on the maintenance of its headquarters than on where the institution’s work is needed most. UN funding runs on two modalities – regular programme funding from member states and extrabudgetary funding.The latter is project-specific and comes from donors, often responding to project proposals drafted by consultants, strategically contracted for no longer than 11 months to avoid the obligation of offering full-time work or project appointments with benefits. Donors can be member states or from the private sector. So, flagship programmes will survive, especially if member states see a strategic reason to keep them running.But that’s not necessarily good news. While some programmes and projects are likely to keep going, they will be run off the backs of exploited and under-resourced consultants. A portion of extrabudgetary funding often goes to help keep the headquarters and field offices running, despite the fact that consultants are the ones implementing the programmes.The UN is in financial straits not only because member states are not paying their dues, but also because it inefficiently siphons money destined for field operations to headquarters based in the Global North.Journalists raise their hands to put questions to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, at a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York on January 29. Photo: Handout from the UN via Xinhua