Mandate review and reform are essential, but evidence shows structural change alone will not necessarily improve results. Reforms must tackle the incentives that drive organisations toward short-term project delivery at the expense of sustainability, inclusiveness and long-term impact.
The Mandate Implementation Review offers a timely opportunity to address persistent weaknesses in mandate implementation. MOPAN evidence underscores that beyond mandates themselves, improving results will require addressing misaligned incentives, weak reporting, and thin policy capacity. UN80 reforms must go beyond streamlining to realign resources, rebuild expertise and integrate functions.
As the informal ad hoc Working Group starts convening, it should consider measures that improve how resources are allocated across all core functions, particularly policy advice, capacity development and direct support and service delivery. More specifically, UN entities and Member States may wish to consider the following mutually reinforcing recommendations:
1. Transparency and accountability
One obstacle to better resource allocation is the lack of disaggregated financial data showing how resources are allocated by function. This prevents the UN system from developing indicators and targets that can strengthen accountability. At the same time, RBM mainstreaming has created unintended incentives for UN entities to prioritise work that is easier to measure, such as direct support and service delivery.
UN entities should enhance financial reporting by function, set clear targets for resource allocation, and align staff performance metrics with system-wide objectives such as collaboration and policy advice.
2. Resourcing policy advice
To strengthen policy advice across the UN system, additional resources must be allocated to this function. However, a larger share of flexible resources, which could be used for this purpose, has not been mobilised, and UN entities at country level have not leveraged regional capacities as initially envisaged. Reviewing cost-recovery policies could enable UN entities to allocate sufficient resources to policy advice.
UN entities should allocate resources to strengthen in-house policy expertise, including through adjusted cost-recovery policies, knowledge partnerships, and greater use of regional capacities.
3. Strategic integration and sustainability
Stronger resources for capacity development and policy advice will only translate into more sustainable results if they lead to substantive changes in strategy development, programme design and ways of working. Driving these changes requires new system-wide guidance and Member State engagement.
UN entities should embed sustainability in humanitarian work: scale up capacity development, strengthen exit strategies, and ensure national and local actors have access to a greater share of humanitarian funding. They should develop system-wide guidance for integrating functions, including normative support, policy advice, capacity development, and service delivery, drawing on the six transitions4 introduced by the UN Secretary-General in response to the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report.
The current funding crisis creates significant risks for mandate implementation and results. It also presents a window of opportunity for the trajectory and focus of the reforms. Policies and approaches with unintended negative effects – such as cost-recovery rules, RBM frameworks, and the over-reliance on earmarked funding – should be reviewed, while leveraging advances in financial data to strengthen system-wide accountability. Greater conceptual clarity, stronger accountability mechanisms, and systematic learning are needed to improve the integration of functions and guide better resource allocation. Ultimately, doing “better with less” will require rethinking country-level configurations: tailoring the mix of functions to context, scaling back operational interventions where national systems are strong, and maintaining essential operational capacity in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
For MOPAN members, deliberations in the Working Group on the Mandate Implementation Review provide a critical entry point. While so far debates have focused largely on mandate creation and rationalisation, MOPAN evidence underlines that rebalancing the functions used by the UN to deliver mandates is critical to achieving sustainable and inclusive results. Bringing this perspective into the UN80 process will be essential to ensure that reforms address not only what mandates exist, but also how they are resourced, integrated and delivered in practice.
