Institutional Development of the UN Secretariat

As the United Nations celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, it becomes pertinent to assess the performance of the UN Secretariat so far. BOB REINALDA takes on the question in a research article in the journal Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations.

“The institutional development of the secretariat of an international organization (IO) depends on the leadership displayed by the executive head and senior staff and on the political settings such as the constitutional leeway, the selection of its main functionaries, the conditions set for activities, and the allocation of resources,” he writes in the article, ‘Institutional Development of the United Nations Secretariat’. “The better the secretariat is managed, the stronger the leadership capacity of the organization’s executive head will be.” 

However, REINALDA adds, it may be questioned whether this same expectation regarding effective management can be applied to the UN. 

When states create IOs, the negotiation results are carefully recorded in the constitution. However, constitutional sections on the secretariat and staff are relatively short and lack detail, which implies that secretariats need to be elaborated by their staff who are given some room to maneuver to do so (in principal-agent theory referred to as ‘agency slack’ or ‘slippage’). 

“This is also true of the UN Charter, with only 5 out of 111 Articles discussing the Secretariat and a major administrative role for the first and successive Secretaries-General.” 

IO secretariats are hierarchically organized organs whose leadership sees to the organization’s continuity, seeks to devote itself to its objectives, runs the headquarters and field missions, and represents the organization vis-à-vis other actors. Secretariats encounter limitations, among them political restrictions and insufficient resources. Playing a role of its own in world politics may not be obvious for IOs, given the major powers’ inclination to curb that role, but executive heads have several assets available to act independently such as their good offices and the IO’s bully pulpit. 

“Since most literature on the UN Secretariat focuses on external, or political, leadership, I examine here the internal, or administrative, leadership,” REINALDA writes. 

When the UN was first established, a choice was made to have one secretariat to serve all principal organs. The Secretary-General is both a political figure, given the opportunity to bring threats to international peace and security to the attention of the Security Council, and the UN’s chief administrative officer. The December 1945 Report of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations stipulated that the Secretary-General’s choice of higher staff and his leadership largely determine “the character and the efficiency of the Secretariat as a whole,” mentioning aspects such as team spirit, moral authority, and Member State confidence. 

The Secretary-General may assume roles as a mediator and an informal adviser to governments, but also will be called on, when exercising administrative duties, to make decisions “which may justly be called political.”

REINALDA assesses the Secretariat’s institutional development, through analysis of the administrative qualities of eight former Secretaries-General, with a focus on how they strengthened the UN Secretariat and how they weakened it.

“No fewer than six out of eight former UN Secretaries-General showed poor administrative leadership of the Secretariat, particularly regarding issues that require specific competences such as staffing, finances, and team coherence,” the author states. 

Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, carved out the Secretary-General’s administrative role, but he weakened it by his troubled staff relations and his betrayal of the Secretariat’s independent character, REINALDA states. The sequence of four weak administrators (U Thant, Kurt Waldheim, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali) during a period of thirty-five years (1961–1996) considerably and continuously enfeebled the Secretariat’s institutional development, which can be attributed to their apparent lack of administrative skills and their understanding of UN finances. Ban Ki-moon’s administrative record was also weak. 

“Only two Secretaries-General had obvious administrative leadership qualities and succeeded in strengthening the Secretariat: [Dag] Hammarskjöld, because he enjoyed administration, and [Kofi] Annan, who profited from knowing the organization from within,” the author notes. Unlike the others, both also mastered intraorganizational relations, particularly with the General Assembly and the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions. These relations are crucial, he stresses, given the Assembly’s inclination to control the Secretariat and to approve new expenditures resulting from what happens in the world, particularly when reform efforts are being made with austerity.

This poor administrative leadership outcome fits some general patterns observed in the literature regarding IO administration, REINALDA states. Trust, confidence, expertise, knowledge, information, and persuasion are crucial skills to the constructive workings of secretariats. But IOs have a relatively poor personnel management record.

Notwithstanding the states’ potential interest in having weak executive heads, the selection process of the UN Secretary-General should from an institutional perspective value not only issues such as gender, but also administrative qualities regarding staffing, finances, and team coherence to break away from the continual process of reform. 

To end the UN’s poor administrative record, particularly in a world with multilateralism under serious pressure, there should be a greater control of internal developments (Secretariat- and UN system-wide).

Reinalda, B. (2020). Institutional Development of the United Nations Secretariat, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 26(2), 325-339. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-02602005

The Rise of Counterterrorism: A Fourth Pillar for the UN?

Seventy-five years ago, the Charter of the United Nations established a new institution with three founding pillars: peace and security, human rights and development.

Over the past 20 years, however, a fourth pillar – counterterrorism – has begun to emerge, through multiple UN Security Council resolutions, a global strategy from the UN General Assembly, the rise of the countering or preventing violent extremism agenda, and the creation of a stand-alone UN Office of Counter-terrorism, ALI ALTIOK and JORDAN STREET write in a new discussion paper.

In ‘A fourth pillar for the United Nations? The rise of counterterrorism’, published by Saferworld, the authors explore the current effects and future implications of the UN’s embrace of counterterrorism, given the mounting evidence of the harmful impacts of this agenda worldwide.

“It is the duty of all states to protect their citizens, and states do have a legitimate right to defend themselves from both external and internal threats,” ALTIOK and STREET write.

“Globally, however, counterterrorism has become many states’ primary pretext for violating human rights in the name of security, portraying particular groups as a security threat. Education and empowerment for peace programs have mutated into tools for preventing young people’s

radicalization leading to violence.” 

Directly and indirectly, peace operations now play a growing role in combatting terrorism, the authors state. Mediation, peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts by the UN and UN partners are being criminalized, discouraged and crowded out. 

“Given that the UN’s work on peace, development and human rights requires building trust and legitimacy with people and communities in an increasingly authoritarian and conflicted world, such approaches put the UN’s effectiveness on the line.

ALTIOK and STREET find that the compromises the UN has struck have come to threaten its ability to uphold its Charter, putting the effectiveness of its work for peace, rights and development on the line. They identify three overarching steps UN leadership and member states can take: 

• Refocus UN strategy on peace, rights and development through stronger processes for analysis, strategy and program development.

• Protect UN credibility and impact by strengthening guidance, oversight and safeguards and standardizing the use of terror-related terminology.

• Turn evidence and experience into improvement.

The United Nations at 75: Managing and Reshaping a Changing International Order

The United Nations is marking the 75th anniversary of its founding amid a rapidly changing world order. What is the future of the organization and multilateralism more generally? 

Despite the manifold challenges to multilateralism, state AMITAV ACHARYA and DAN PLESCH, there are grounds of hope for the future of the United Nations. 

First, the demand for multilateralism has varied, the authors write in ‘The United Nations: Managing and Reshaping a Changing World Order’, published in the journal Global Governance.

In the United States, both the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations retreated from multilateralism, although to a lesser extent than Donald Trump. Domestic politics can be a double-edged sword insofar as support for the UN is concerned. “Here is a striking example: despite Trump’s rhetoric against multilateralism, the US Congress has kept funding for the UN stable,” ACHARYA and PLESCH state.

Second, the demand for multilateralism is driven by a combination of strategic, normative, and functional logics. If the idea of multilateralism as good and desirable for its own sake is discarded, then the strategic and functional reasons for it might persist or even increase to compensate for it. Rising powers such as China and India, along with traditional powers, see multilateralism as important to their status and influence.

Transnational challenges defy national boundaries, which no single nation or bloc can solve on its own. “This reality does not itself sustain multilateralism since not all agree on its importance. But this also means that the need and demand for multilateralism is not just a moral imperative, but also a practical necessity.”

Third, the demand for multilateralism varies across issues, according to the authors. A study published in 2016 showed that while demand for global governance might be strengthening in the need to address climate change, human rights, global security governance, and mass atrocities, it is weakening in health, trade, and even possibly finance (where it may be static after having risen in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial turmoil). 

Also, in some areas such as trade and finance, the demand for global governance is crisis driven. “Understanding these variations across issue areas and time is important in generalizing and devising ways of addressing challenges to the UN and its role in global governance.”

Fourth, while the decentering and fragmentation of multilateralism can create confusion, increase transaction costs, and possibly lead to reduced effectiveness of existing UN-based global governance institutions and mechanisms, it is also clear that fragmentation is driven by the demonstrated weaknesses and failures of existing mechanisms and their lack of normative and performance legitimacy. 

In this context, the emergence of new actors and frameworks of multilateralism due to the proliferation of new actors is not necessarily at the expense of the UN. “This is not a zero-sum game, but a positive-sum one, one that offers considerable scope for divisions of labor,” ACHARYA and PLESCH state.

For example, human rights laws today are enforced not only in international courts, but also through criminal prosecutions in domestic courts of former state officials, where both international law and domestic criminal law are used. 

The International Criminal Court has been joined by more than two dozen international enforcement courts in the world enforcing human rights law. This promotes human rights around the world. 

Some bilateral and plurilateral arrangements create stricter standards for intellectual property protection and tougher enforcement penalties for intellectual property infringement than existing Trade-Related Aspects on Intellectual Property measures. Hence, they support the goals of global trade governance, if not its primary multilateral institution. 

In finance, a key development is the emergence of ‘cooperative decentralization’ as a form of fragmentation, resulting from the 2008–2009 financial crisis. These regional and plurilateral financial arrangements worked with the International Monetary Fund. Opinion is divided on the benefits and costs of this form, with critics skeptical of their ability effectively contain crises while others see them as durable and positive forces in global financial regulation.

In climate change, the authors state, the proliferation of initiatives does not replace or weaken the UN’s role. At the same time, as academic literature has pointed out, institutions are sticky—it’s easier to modify them than to create new ones. 

Hence, as existing multilateral institutions come under pressure, they will not be displaced, but new arrangements may emerge with respect to aspects of environmental degradation such as industrial pollution and deforestation. Fragmentation can be creative, leading to innovation in problem solving.

Fifth, despite the current pessimism about global governance, the demand for multilateral action is wider than ever before—a key factor supporting the future of the UN. A good deal of recent literature on agency is concerned with the proliferation of actors, especially looking beyond the state-centric focus of the early literature to capture the role of transnational civil society and the private sector, and so forth. 

But the issue of agency goes well beyond bringing the nonstate actors in. Equally important is that the US role in creating and maintaining the global governance architecture has been more limited and less positive while the contribution of others including Europeans and the developing countries (and the weaker actors more generally) is less appreciated but more substantial and extensive than is usually captured in the academic literature and policy debate. 

This is clear in the area of human rights, Responsibility to Protect, climate change, and internet governance, the last being an understudied area where the US role has come under intense criticism after the revelations by intelligence analyst David Snowden in 2013 of massive and systematic US surveillance of the internet.

“However, these factors are not enough to keep the UN going in the long term,” ACHARYA and PLESCH write. “Critically, leaders must pay more attention to selling the benefits of multilateralism and the UN to domestic audiences. To this end, a comprehensive and nonpartisan assessment audit of the benefits of multilateralism for countries is necessary to reduce political partisanship and bias in the debate over the necessity and importance of the UN.”

Acharya, A., & Plesch, D. (2020). The United Nations, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 26(2), 221-235. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-02602001