How Street-Level UN Bureaucrats Promote Partnerships for Sustainable Development in Challenging Contexts

Despite challenging contexts, UN Partnerships Officers and Resident Coordinators are tasked to promote multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for sustainable development in over 162 countries in a reformed, but critically underfunded UN Development System. This paper aims to analyze the challenges UN Partnerships Officers face in promoting MSPs, and how they deal with these challenges in their daily work, and for whom this has which implications. Theoretically, it approaches UN Partnerships Officers as street-level bureaucrats, examining the level of their discretion and whether it is used responsibly in promoting MSP despite challenges. Previous research warns that the UN uses its discretion while promoting MSPs to advance private interests instead of public ones, and mostly focuses on low-hanging fruits instead of those left behind. Employing the lens of street-level bureaucracy allows to examine the level and consequences of discretion more openly. Empirically, it examines existing evaluation reports, and conducts a qualitative survey distributed to all UN Resident Coordinator Offices and their Partnerships Officers. It finds that certain traits of the UN as an international bureaucracy, namely its neutrality, principal-agent relationship, funding issues, staffing policy and summitry act as barriers to promoting MSPs at the country level. While previous research warns against discretion in promoting MSPs as undercutting accountability, this paper finds that UN Partnerships Officers in the field carefully navigate this discretion to promote MSPs responsibly. Nevertheless, discretion is rather used to act as brokers to promote MSPs, upholding the stability of the UN Country Team, than entrepreneurially, advancing the inclusion of stakeholders left behind. This has implications for discussions on having more centralized rules for MSPs within the UN.