Understanding Change in International Organizations Across Time and Spaces: The Rise of UN Country Teams
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Luciana Campos |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13018 |
Understanding Change in International
Organizations Across Time and Spaces: The
Rise of UN Country Teams
Luciana Campos
Operation Welcome - Federal Subcommittee of Shelter and Relocation, Brazilian Ministry
of Citzenship
Abstract
This article analyses the progress of the agenda committed to tackle the fragmentation of the UN system to better understand
the process of institutional change in International Organizations. Focusing on changes undergone by the UN’s country-level
presence, the case study of the voluntary implementation of Delivering as One initiative (DaO) in Mozambique and Vietnam
demonstrates how common plans, joint programs and pooled funds have promoted better divisions of labor and settled
divergences among UN entities. This has fostered the national ownership of UN country-level activities and developed the
nexus of humanitarian-development agendas. Pilot countries and donors resorted to selective incentives for the engagement
of UN bureaucracies, who, especially at headquarters, remained resistant to reforms. Reform was subject to incentives and
constraints that were introduced and manifested unevenly across spaces and over time. It lost momentum both in Mozam-
bique and Vietnam following the pilot phase, when donors’engagement faltered, but had more enduring effects in the latter,
where the government’s greater capacity to engage in favor of reforms supported the compliance of UN country offices. This
indicates the United Nations Country Teams (UNCT) consolidation amid institutional changes based on layering institutional
innovations alongside extant structures, overcoming conflicts of loyalties.
Policy Implications
1. The UN and donors alike should diversify and balance investments on reforms, focusing on the enactment of pillars
behind United Nations Country Teams (UNCT) cohesiveness beyond the RC system, investing strategically and in an inte-
grated manner on common plans, pooled funds, common back office, and the harmonization of business.
2. The new Resident Coordinator system should abide by no-size-fits-all and national ownership principles. Vertical decentral-
ization is needed to avoid a top-down approach of the new generation of UNCT.
3. UNCT should embark on a joint assessment of its comparative advantage to decide on their division of labor to move for-
ward Agenda 2030 in any given country.
4. UNCT should tailor its activities through meaningful and strategic United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation
Frameworks that reflect system-wide visions, thereby mitigating the negative effects of earmarked funding.
5. Member states should engage with reforms by offering selective incentives in return for compliance, such as contributions
to pooled funds to fund joint programs, empowering RCs and national governments to oversee their allocation alongside
UNCT.
The UN country teams as a feasible system-wide
reform
Practitioners and scholars alike have paid considerable
attention to the broad topic of reforming the United Nations
(UN), but existing work often focuses on headquarters’
negotiations to the detriment of empirically analyzing how
and to what extent reforms translate into actual institutional
changes at the field level. There are numerous, often com-
peting, proposals to tackle the fragmentation and lack of
coordination within the UN system, ranging from a full
review of existing entities to piecemeal approaches. Against
this backdrop, the process of change undergone by the
governance of the UN system at the country-level gained
traction by outliving and deepening previous reform propos-
als. By assessing the consolidation of United Nations Coun-
try Teams (UNCT) over the last few decades, this article
sheds light on how institutional change takes place at the
UN and in International Organizations (IOs) in general. In
particular, the account here provides an insight into why
and how time and space influence the enactment of
change, contributing to a growing literature on time and
space in the study of IOs (Maertens et al., this special issue).
Of the UN’s 52 programs, funds, specialized agencies and
related organizations with multiple headquarters, some 34
work on the ground supported by offices across 162
Global Policy (2022) 12:Suppl.7 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.13018 ©2021 Durham University and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 12 . Issue 7 . December 2021 55
Special Issue Article
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