New study: Gaza and Ukraine demonstrate urgent need for UN reform

A new study from Cambridge Judge Business School published in May argues that recent global crises in Gaza, Ukraine and sub-Saharan Africa demonstrate the urgent need for United Nations reform. The paper calls for a shift in focus toward decision-making capacity and organisational innovation to overcome growing UN paralysis.

By analysing the UN through a meta-organisational lens, the study identifies structural barriers within the international system and suggests a new pathway to reinvigorate global peacekeeping efforts.

Published in the academic journal Peacebuilding, the study says UN failure in addressing recent crises signals the need for solutions outside of existing multilateral structures, so systemic reform must focus on decision-making and innovation to help the UN meet its admirable goals. The paper draws on organisational theory to examine the challenges facing innovators in so-called meta-organisations like the UN, which are in effect organisations that count autonomous organisations as members, and aim to amplify members’ interests through collective action.

The paper also suggests future avenues for research both theoretical and practical to help usher in a “vital shift in direction for a multilateral system that has fallen prey to polarising national interests and decaying provision of funding”.

Barriers to innovation within the UN system

The study identifies 5 key decision-making challenges facing UN peacekeeping:

Impediments to innovation in UN peacekeeping

Likewise, the challenges in fostering innovation in UN peacekeeping are multifaceted. These include coherent leadership given the size and complexity of the UN and the lack of horizontal integration across UN departments and programmes. There is also a complicated funding structure for UN peacekeeping in which financial resources are drawn from both the regular UN budget and the peacekeeping budget.

In addition, innovation faces obstacles in the form of a reimbursement system that can incentivise national deployment of large troop contingents armed with low-cost equipment, and what the authors term systemic inertia including composition of the UN Security Council (UNSC) whose 5 permanent members are unchanged since the organisation’s inception 80 years ago. “Simply put, the composition, powers and working methods of the UNSC are no longer fit for purpose, and only dramatic reform in this area can arrest the decline in the relevance of global, rules-based multilateralism,” the paper says.

A roadmap for UN reform

“We believe insufficient attention has been directed to the organisational factors underpinning the work of the UN,” the authors conclude. “Viewing the UN system as a meta-organisation opens new avenues of action that could help address some of the fundamental barriers to reform of the international system.

“This reform should focus on work in 2 areas: improving the ability of the multilateral system to make decisions, and to innovate. Put simply, it is increasingly apparent that working within the existing paradigm is unlikely to result in an agile global, rules-based multilateral system capable of addressing ever more complex security challenges.”

Study cites workstreams of the Cambridge Peaceshaping and Climate Lab

The paper is authored by Jarrod Pendlebury, former Australian Military Advisor to the United Nations and Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation (CCSI) at Cambridge Judge, Neil Stott, Management Practice Professor of Social Innovation, and Paul Tracey, Professor of Innovation and Organisation.

The study cites the work of the Cambridge Peaceshaping and Climate Lab at the CCSI, a research centre co-directed by Neil and Paul. The Lab aims to bring clarity to the concept of peaceshaping by focusing on dedicated workstreams including climate-related mobility issues (including involuntary movement of people due to floods and other activities linked to climate change) and peacegaming (which draws off military wargaming to improve preparedness and effectiveness).