Coping with Budget Pressures: UN Administrations Between Complex Principals and Global Goals

The United Nations, its specialised agencies, and its other bodies are tasked to provide a range of global public goods: peace, development, human rights, and many more that have been added to the list since the era of the League of Nations. With the overall growth of UN membership, the complexity of interests has increased substantially, and so have budget pressures resulting from disagreement over collective priorities. New global goals – such as those on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – may be agreed at high-level summits. But, the nitty-gritty in the follow-up is as important, when it comes to prioritising these tasks, politically and financially, including with regard to other global goals that remain on the agenda and that still need financing. The assumption that we want to test with this paper is that UN administrations' financing structures and budgetary procedures are a function of this conflict between divergent political and financial priorities of complex principals. The UN's secretariats need to find a balance between the interests of major donors (especially in the Geneva Group) and the priorities of those with voting majorities (especially the G77 and China) and the resulting budget pressures. At the same time, they need to work in support of the global goals agreed by political leaders. We demonstrate that strengthening of central programming, budgeting and/or resource mobilisation offices has been one typical administrative reaction during or after budgetary crises resulting from revenue-side pressures in the UN, UNESCO and ILO, e.g. when major donors withhold contributions. Depending on the level of crises and disagreement, this should also require increased involvement of Secretaries-Generals and their services in financial matters. However, we show in turn for the UN, UNESCO and WHO that establishing budget procedures for specialised policies (such as peacekeeping) or promoting decentralised resource allocation (including through trust funds) has been a typical reaction to expenditure-side pressures, e.g. when new tasks are added suddenly but central budget procedures are not apt to find compromises. Decentralisation and budget multiplication can then allow the emergence of complex compromises at political level, because member states (groups) can focus on the issues that are most salient for them, influencing decentralised administrative structures through political or financial incentives. While this may appear as an undermining of multilateralism and unnecessary complexity of UN administrative structures, it may actually allow the UN administrations to effectively work towards a range of global goals under difficult conditions.