IO Autonomy and ‘Minilateral Aid’: Assessing the Impact of Pooled Funding on UN Performance

In a global context marked by declining aid volumes and weakening commitment to multilateralism, ensuring that scarce resources are channelled efficiently has become critical for sustaining development outcomes. Recent scholarship has begun to examine how features of international organisations’ (IOs) financing relate to their performance. However, extant research has largely overlooked a distinctive component of the financing architecture: the pooled funding mechanism. Scholarly attention has centred on how member states exert control through voluntary earmarked contributions, highlighting that these negatively affect organisational performance compared to unearmarked (core) funding. Pooled funds occupy a unique middle ground: they remain voluntary and purpose-specific, yet grant implementing agencies considerably greater autonomy. They also create a form of ‘minilateral’ governance that enables collective decision-making among subsets of member states. Despite the prominence of pooled funding in UN policy, including its endorsement under the 2019 UN Funding Compact and its purported role in accelerating the 2030 Agenda, systematic evidence on its effects remains absent. This study addresses that gap using a mixed-methods research design that combines large-N observational analysis with qualitative inquiry across UN development agencies, funds, and programmes. I argue that pooled funding represents the most desirable form of voluntary contributions from a member-state perspective: it enhances organisational performance relative to tightly earmarked funding while mitigating risks of agency slack more effectively than core contributions. Amid an ongoing crisis in global development financing, and bringing the perspective of a former UN practitioner, this research aims to provide empirically grounded insights to inform donor practices, strengthen organisational performance, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of development programmes.