Assessing efficiency in multilateral organisations will remain both essential and complex. It requires navigating multiple organisational dimensions, each with its own trade-offs, while recognising that efficiency is about more than cost savings – it is about maximising value for resources invested. This Brief has provided an initial overview of selected dimensions of the UN, but there is scope for deeper inquiry.
Moving forward, MOPAN can help shape a more sophisticated conversation on efficiency by encouraging clear, shared definitions of terms such as efficiency, cost-efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and value for money. While these concepts are often used interchangeably, each carries distinct implications for policy, management, and reform design. Clarifying and applying them consistently will help avoid narrow interpretations and enable more balanced assessments that take into account financial, managerial, operational, and programmatic considerations.
MOPAN’s analysis in this brief could be usefully complemented by a closer exploration of certain dimensions that are critical to organisational and system-wide efficiency, including:
Financial management efficiency: examining how budgets are formulated, aligned with priorities, and executed can reveal whether resources are used as intended and with agility. More detailed analysis of budget execution rates, including absorptive capacity and spending discipline, could offer valuable insights for both organisations and their funders.
Administrative and support costs: a clearer picture of how overheads, cost-recovery mechanisms (false economies, cross-subsidisation, etc.), and staff cost structures are managed would strengthen assessments of efficiency. Combining MOPAN evidence with external sources, such as audit reports, could provide a deeper analysis.
Relocation of functions: as organisations move functions and staff to lower-cost locations, there is an opportunity to assess the real impacts – positive or negative – on cost-efficiency, service quality, and strategic capacity. Lessons here could inform future location strategies across the system.
Digitalisation and automation: there is scope for a deeper analysis of how digital transformation is being pursued across the multilateral system and its implications for efficiency. Cultural transformation: There is scope for further analysis of how organisations can foster a culture that actively promotes efficiency and embraces change. Structural reforms – such as new policies, processes, and organisational arrangements – must be accompanied by corresponding behavioural shifts to ensure meaningful and sustained impact.
As mentioned in the introduction, this brief is the first product in a broader series of MOPAN Insights on Multilateral Effectiveness in a Shifting Landscape. Two additional thematic briefs will be delivered in the coming weeks on results and mandate implementation, and on comparative advantage and collaboration. A separate mapping exercise will track multilateral responses to global funding cuts, with findings from organisations previously assessed by MOPAN shared later in the autumn. Two Topical Insights with a sectoral focus are also planned: on Global Health starting in 2025, and on Humanitarian Action starting in 2026.
These products are designed to be practical tools for reform discussions. Engagement moments will be aligned, where possible, with the UN80 Task Force process and the UN General Assembly consultations beginning in September 2025. The mapping exercise will also help inform MOPAN members’ and other donors’ funding decisions, ensuring that allocation choices reflect up-to-date, evidence-based analysis of efficiency, resilience, and organisational capacity to adapt.