Thoughts on the UN80 mandate review
TL;DR: it's a trap!
During his 24 June briefing to Member States on the UN80 initiative, UN Under-Secretary-General for Policy Guy Ryder demoed an impressive-looking mandate registry as the centerpiece of his presentation on progress in the second workstream of the UN80 initiative, the mandate review. Although the mandate registry provides a potentially useful reference tool, its practical value to the broader UN80 initiative remains unclear. In fact, this is a problem with the entire mandate review workstream—the likelihood that it will yield useful insights to inform reform-related decision-making is extremely slim.1 As indicated by the Secretary-General on 12 May, the objective of the mandate review is to identify “duplications, redundancies, or opportunities for greater synergy on implementation”. This exercise, however, is built on a flawed premise, as mandates are not the cause of duplication, redundancy, and inefficiency within the UN. The inflated expectations from the mandate review by its proponents stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of mandates at the United Nations.
So, what is a mandate? A mandate is a decision by a legislative body regarding the form or function of the Secretariat. Mandates are the source of the authority of the Secretariat to undertake its activities and are the basis for resource requests. The relevant legislative decisions that create mandates take various forms, including resolutions and presidential statements, and they contain both open-ended and time bound instructions to the Secretariat.2 Open-ended instructions remain valid until they are either explicitly cancelled or implicitly superseded by another decision. Examples of mandates include the establishment of entities (e.g., departments or missions, which can be either open-ended or timebound), the request for deliverables (e.g., preparation of a report or convening of a meeting), or policy guidance (e.g., how programmatic activities should be implemented or the application of considerations such as gender and geographical representation in staffing decisions).
Even open-ended mandates generally have a natural lifecycle. Many mandates are superseded when an intergovernmental body makes a different or updated pronouncement on the same subject. And when there are organizational restructurings (as has happened early in the term of office of every Secretary-General since the end of the Cold War), many mandates implemented by defunct entities become obsolete or are superseded based on the functions and outputs approved by the General Assembly for the new entities. In fact, Guy Ryder’s 24 June presentation shows that most of the existing mandates are from the past ten years. Mandates therefore do not require active pruning by Member States, as mandates that are no longer relevant are naturally disposed of through normal intergovernmental processes.
Moreover, an exercise in reviewing mandates can easily devolve into an acrimonious and time-consuming negotiation process. Each mandate has champions among Member States as well as in the organizational units within the Secretariat who need to maintain their portfolio of mandates to justify their activities and level of resources. These competing interests set up a zero-sum dynamic that is difficult to overcome, as no group of Member States and no Secretariat entity wants to emerge worse off than its counterparts and rivals. In fact, an intergovernmental mandate review was undertaken as part of the implementation of the 2005 World Summit Outcome, but was ultimately discontinued in 2008 due in large part to such challenges. Furthermore, the absence of a clear linkage between mandates and resources meant that the review was unable to contribute to strengthening or updating the programme of work to better respond to the contemporary requirements of Member States, although it helped increase Member State awareness of the range of existing mandates.3 Given that the disconnect between mandates and resources has not changed, it is hard to imagine that a new mandate review will result in a significantly different outcome.
In order to achieve the objective of reducing duplication and redundancy, Member States should not waste time with another mandate review. Instead, they should focus their attention on what entities are implementing mandates and in what manner. Indeed, coherence failures within the UN bureaucracy are more often the product of deficiencies of management and internal coordination within the Secretariat rather than the result of conflicting mandates. Although individual mandates may currently be implemented by specific entities, most mandates are instructions to the Secretary-General rather than to those specific entities, and the Secretary-General often has broad discretion on how mandates should be implemented by the Secretariat as a whole.
So why did the Secretary-General call for a mandate review as part of UN80? Several possible motives come to mind. For one, the concept of a mandate review feeds a narrative that is easy to understand: that the Secretariat is faced with a vast set of obsolete and overlapping instructions that undermine its effectiveness, and a review can help streamline the work of the Organization. But a more cynical reading is also possible: pushing for a mandate review provides a way for the Secretary-General to avoid having to exercise his authority as chief administrative officer in confronting entities in how they undertake their work by pushing the responsibility for promoting greater coherence in the work of the UN to its Member States.
© 2025 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
And this is without getting into methodological issues, including the lack of differentiation between types of mandates as well as the divergent practices used by Secretariat entities in identifying mandates.
Complicating the mandate landscape is the fact that, although most instructions to the Secretariat are presented in the text of legislative decisions (such as in the operative paragraphs of resolutions), many of the instructions are not actually contained the text of decisions, as in the cases of legislative bodies endorsing proposals of the Secretary-General or recommendations of an expert body like the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions.
Source: Letter dated 8 August 2008 from the co-chairs of the mandate review process to the President of the General Assembly.