The paper argues that although the reform process demonstrates important results, one cannot conclude that these results guarantee the UN system’s “relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, accountability and credibility” nor can one ensure the sustainability of the reform efforts achieved. The underlying rationale hereby is that the pilot reform initiative started at the country level only. Under the leadership of the Resident Coordinator (One Leader), the members of the UN country team engaged in vast change management activities including a new division of labor and a change of programming and budget allocation methods. Lesson learned from the experience will need to be analyzed at the corporate and UN system-wide level and integrated in relevant strategies (programming, management), which requests massive system-wide systemic changes to backstop these changes and make them sustainable (institutionalization).
The ‘Delivering as One’ reform process was launched to introduce and implement new organizational norms and standards. It is therefore most appropriate to embed the analysis within the Norm ‘Life Cycle’ framework developed by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink1. I use a constructivist approach to analyze the different stages of the reform process (norm emergence, norm cascade, and internalization) of the “Delivering as One” reform. In my analysis I try to demonstrate that the three-stage norm-life cycle, as Finnemore and Sikkink propose, only applies to the development of global thematic/issue norms (e.g. Human Rights, MDGs) while for global systemic changes a fourth stage is needed. I argue that this fourth stage only would provide the conditions to institutionalize the reform efforts of DaO and SWC, and make it sustainable in the long-run. Only at this point, one can see if the reform efforts have increased the UN’s capacity to deliver country programmes in a more effective and efficient way.
