A year ago, as the UN80 process gathered momentum, I argued that the reform effort, while rightly addressing the UN’s sprawling bureaucracy, overlapping mandates and institutional inefficiencies, risked becoming primarily an exercise in cost-cutting. The deeper challenge was to restore purpose and capacity to an organization confronting growing global demands with shrinking resources. This required a more predictable and less politicized financing system, reforms anchored in the functions the UN is uniquely equipped to perform, and renewed attention to the Charter’s largely unfulfilled commitments to disarmament and effective collective security. The central message was simple: efficiency matters, but lasting reform must begin by asking what we need the United Nations to do and then giving it the institutions, instruments and resources necessary to do it.

How has the debate shifted since the launch of UN80?

From efficiency to purpose

Without doubt UN80 was intended to address real problems, and those should not be minimized. The UN has accumulated an extraordinarily complex institutional architecture: more than 140 entities, thousands of offices, mandates and resolutions. There is duplication, bureaucratic inertia and too much institutional energy devoted to process rather than outcomes. Streamlining structures, eliminating obsolete mandates and improving administrative efficiency are therefore entirely legitimate objectives. 

However, as I noted a year ago, there is a danger that UN80 becomes primarily an austerity exercise. Having spent the better part of my professional career in multilateral international institutions I know, from experience, that austerity exercises do not have a good track record. The central question should not be simply: Where can the UN save money? It should be: What do we need the United Nations to do in the years and decades ahead? Only after answering that question can we sensibly decide what institutional architecture and resources it requires. The distinction matters particularly for small and medium-sized countries, whose security and international influence depend disproportionately on a functioning rules-based multilateral system.  

Fixing the way the UN is financed

The paradox is that demands upon the UN are rising just as its resources are contracting. Climate change, conflict, unsustainable debt, poverty and inequality, humanitarian emergencies and other transnational risks are intensifying, even as the UN’s financial base is coming under growing pressure. After reaching a high point in 2022, UN system revenues fell appreciably in 2023 and recovered only slightly the following year. Adjusted for inflation, the decline has been considerably more pronounced, and current projections suggest that the financial pressures facing the UN system are likely to intensify further over the next several years.  Cutting capacity without reconsidering the financing model risks weakening the institution precisely when collective action is becoming more necessary.  

This points to one of the deeper problems that UN80 should confront: the way the UN is financed. About 60 percent of UN-system funding in 2024 came from earmarked contributions. That gives individual donors considerable influence over priorities, fragments programming, encourages agencies to compete for funds and weakens the collective authority of the membership, including the General Assembly’s budgetary role under Article 17. 

A stronger UN therefore requires not simply more money, but a different financing architecture. One possibility would be for every Member State to contribute a common, very small share of national income—perhaps around 0.1 percent of GNI—to a consolidated UN budget. This would create greater predictability and shared ownership and reduce the ability of individual governments to use contributions as instruments of political leverage. Poorer countries would contribute less in absolute terms while typically receiving considerably more through UN programmes. Indeed, the Global Governance Forum published last year a detailed proposal on how to put the UN finances on a more stable foundation.

Europe itself offers an interesting precedent. The EU has gradually developed an “own resources” system based on automatic, rules-based revenue streams rather than renegotiating its entire financial base every year. Something analogous could eventually be developed for the UN, with national governments collecting and transferring agreed resources through existing mechanisms. The point is not to create a global tax bureaucracy, but to give the international system a stable financial foundation for providing global public goods. 

This leads to a broader question about what UN reform is actually for. Efficiency should serve function, not the reverse. We should identify those things that only an institution with near-universal membership can effectively provide—international norms, conflict prevention, protection of vulnerable populations, humanitarian action and global public goods—and design the institution around those purposes. In this way we recognize something that has become increasingly obvious: most of the global problems we face do not admit sensible solutions outside of a framework of much stronger international cooperation. Otherwise “efficiency” can easily become another word for retrenchment. 

Recovering the UN’s unfinished mandate

And once we ask what the UN was created to do, we encounter an uncomfortable fact: some of the most important provisions of the existing Charter were never implemented. The Charter envisaged meaningful disarmament under international control and a collective-security system with enforcement capacity. Those provisions largely became casualties of the Cold War. Eighty years later, global military expenditures vastly exceed the resources devoted to the entire UN system, while the UN is repeatedly asked to manage the humanitarian consequences of conflicts it has inadequate capacity to prevent. 

So perhaps the real opportunity presented by UN80 is to distinguish between two levels of reform. There are reforms we can and should undertake within the present institutional architecture—better management, mandate consolidation, more predictable financing, stronger General Assembly oversight. But there are also structural weaknesses that cannot ultimately be resolved through administrative reform alone. 

From UN80 to Charter reform

That brings us to the Charter itself. The Charter was an extraordinary achievement in 1945, but it embodied the political compromises and power relationships of that particular historical moment. The world it governs today—with 193 Member States, nuclear weapons, climate change, global financial interdependence, artificial intelligence and vastly greater expectations of international institutions—is profoundly different. 

The question, therefore, is whether we should begin thinking seriously about a second generation of Charter reforms. Not because everything in the existing Charter should be discarded—quite the contrary—but because its fundamental principles of peace, human rights, international law and cooperation need institutions capable of making those principles effective under 21st-century conditions, also to safeguard the institution´s legitimacy and credibility. 

This is the thinking behind the proposal for a Second United Nations Charter. It asks what the UN might look like if we retained the achievements and principles of 1945 while addressing the structural deficiencies revealed by eight decades of experience: a more representative and accountable system of governance, more reliable financing, stronger collective-security arrangements, credible pathways toward disarmament, and institutions better equipped to deal with genuinely global problems. The underlying argument is the same one that should animate UN80: first decide what kind of United Nations the world needs, and then build and finance an institution capable of delivering it. And, lest we forget, the Charter itself, through Article 109, provides the pathway to have that most important of conversations. 

Leadership for the next stage

Structural reform requires political leadership, and the selection of a new Secretary-General provides an unusually important opportunity to supply it. The Secretary-Generalship is arguably the world’s most consequential international civil-service position, and the overriding criterion should therefore be excellence. The search should seek a person of exceptional capacity, independence, integrity, diplomatic judgment, political courage, managerial ability and commitment to the Charter, precisely the sorts of qualities the General Assembly has itself identified in successive resolutions on the selection process. UN reform is ultimately not only about institutional architecture. Institutions require leadership. The selection of a new Secretary-General therefore offers Member States an unusual opportunity to demonstrate that they are serious about renewal.