Lessons from the Creation of UN Women for the UN80 Reform Effort
UN Photo/MB, November 3, 1961
NOVEMBER 2025
As the UN80 reform process moves forward, it is a useful moment to look back at some of the key lessons from the 2010 creation of UN Women. The importance of building demand for reform, allowing sufficient time and space to achieve alignment on desired outcomes and mandates, and injecting outside leadership and expertise into organizational planning all stand out as key points to consider in the current moment. This brief white paper shares some of the insights gleaned from a literature review of the creation of UN Women. The bottom line up-front for today’s reform efforts: well-designed restructures backed by a relatively clear vision and broad political and diplomatic support can lead to more effective operations – but failing to put those elements in place will likely lead to negative outcomes.
Introduction
In July 2010 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 64/289, it formally established the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, more widely known simply as UN Women. The creation of UN Women reflected both a desire to raise the UN’s level of ambition in addressing gender issues and widespread Member State frustration that the existing bodies working on gender issues suffered from overlapping mandates and a lack of coordination that made the sum of their efforts to strengthen women’s rights and well-being less effective than their parts.
UN Women was drawn from four existing entities – the UN Division of the Advancement of Women (DAW), the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), the UN Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI), and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM.) These existing institutions were quite varied in history, mission, and scope, but all played different roles in promoting women’s rights, funding programs for the advancement of women, and conducting research toward those ends.
Given that the United Nations and Member States are now exploring a panoply of organizational reforms and potential restructurings as part of the UN80 process and deep budget pressure, it is useful to explore the lessons learned from the creation of UN Women and their implications for the current moment.
Key Takeaways and their Implications for Current Reform Efforts
Mergers have been relatively rare within the UN system and, given that fact, they should be approached with highly deliberate strategy and significant clarity regarding their purpose.
While UN agencies and institutions have been reorganized frequently over the years, and the UN organizational chart has grown increasingly complex and mandates have proliferated, there have been surprisingly few mergers and genuine consolidations of existing entities over the course of the UN’s history. In general, it has proven much easier for the General Assembly to create new entities or to rebrand existing ones than to actually execute full scale mergers.
This obviously makes the lessons from the creation of UN Women more relevant as the Secretary-General has put plans to potentially merge UN Women and UNFPA and UNOPS and UNDP on the table as part of the UN80 process. But there should also be a note of caution for Member States and outside observers. In looking at these mergers, and the even more sweeping efforts that some have suggested (such as merging the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNHCR, or a push to consolidate the World Food Program, the International Fund for Agriculture, and the Food and Agriculture Organization) there is not a lot of experience upon which to draw. That is not to pre-judge the merit of any of these ideas, instead it is to argue that the UN system has not managed many successful mergers or consolidations, and they are likely to prove more challenging than they may appear at first blush, which makes achieving clarity of purpose and reaching agreement on any desired potential end state all the more vital.
Mergers are neither inherently good nor bad.
The fact that consolidations have been relatively rare within the UN system underscores an important point: mergers, in and of themselves, are neither inherently good nor bad. They are an organizational tool and process whose merit is very much driven on a case-by-case basis. The ultimate test of a potential merger is found in the end results. Does it produce an organization more likely to deliver results? Is it more cost effective? Does it reduce overlap and competition while producing genuine synergies in terms of approaches, expertise, and personnel?
Unfortunately, all too often people approach merger and consolidation questions with a predisposition to defend turf, to automatically assume the fewer the organizations the better, or that the existing systems are somehow sacrosanct because they are what is currently in place.
The prospects of change are intimidating. But in the case of UN Women, decisive momentum was achieved because a critical mass of actors were convinced that a merger seemed like not only a logical path forward, but a desirable one. In the case of UN Women, those diplomatic seeds were initially planted years before with the 2006 Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on System-wide Coherence in the Areas of Development, Humanitarian Assistance, and the Environment : Delivering as One which was the genesis for this approach.
The push for mergers almost always comes from budget concerns and a failure of existing structures to effectively delineate their roles and responsibilities to eliminate overlap and duplication of efforts.
Researchers Charlesworth and Chinkin note that the drive to create UN Women came in substantial part because the UN’s institutional engagement with women that preceded it was “ad hoc, creating complex levels of responsibility as new institutions were layered onto existing structures” and that UN Member States “proliferated institutional mandates and tasks while rarely being able to dismantle outdated or ineffective ones for political reasons.”
That statement could be applied, writ large, to a great deal of the UN system today, and has certainly illuminated the drive for reform under the UN80 process. As a recent report by the Secretary-General on UN80 noted, “With numerous entities, governance arrangements and mandates, there is significant scope to strengthen efficiency, effectiveness, coherence, transparency and accountability” within the UN system.
And while many parts of the UN system have objected loudly to recent discussions of potential mergers related to their functions and expertise, there likely would not be discussions in the first place if UN entities had done a better job clearly delineating their roles and responsibilities in a clear and effective fashion. To be fair, some of this is also a function of overlapping mandates, but those should only be seen as a partial culprit.
There is also mounting pressure today to explore organizational mergers through the UN80 process and beyond because of the increasingly steep budget pressures on the United Nations. (The Secretary-General has insisted that UN80 is not a budget-driven exercise, but it clearly is to a very significant extent, and denying so is ultimately likely to prove counter-productive.) As former UN Assistant Secretary-General John Hendra notes, “this year is also marked by the increasingly alarming liquidity crisis facing the UN Secretariat. According to The Economist, internal modelling shows that without significant reductions in UN Secretariat operations, the year-end cash deficit will be short US$ 1.1 billion, effectively meaning the UN Secretariat would be without enough money to pay staff and expenses by September 2025.” As he adds, delays by Member States in paying their assessments, particularly the United States and China, is only further adding to a “dire fiscal situation.” In a deeply constrained resource environment, organizations with overlapping missions and operations become attractive targets for merger discussions.
But it is equally true that mergers are not going to fix the UN’s budget woes, a disproportionate amount of which stem from the failure of UN Member States to pay their assessments in a timely fashion. There is a danger that excessive discussion of mergers and efficiencies can create a false impression among Member States that they will produce almost magical savings. Even effectively merged organizations would need regular budget support in the form of assessed and voluntary contributions.
Creating political demand for change is essential, and this should be seen as a warning sign for UN80.
The push to create UN Women enjoyed considerable support voiced by an active constituency of Member States, development practitioners, and civil society. As author Saraswathi Menon notes, establishing UN Women was responsive to “a long-standing demand of the women’s movement” that was pushing for the “creation of a single UN institution that could spearhead change.” This aligned diplomatic and political support was essential in guiding the sometimes-tricky negotiations and process around merging four institutions into one and creating the new mandate that would guide its work.
As a recent report by the UN Staff College rightly observed, “The political navigation that enabled the creation of UN Women was as intricate as the merger itself. Member States were active architects, each with distinct interests, sensitivities, and strategic calculations.” This same report also concludes, “Member States, civil society, and internal stakeholders brought competing priorities and sensitivities to the table, making the merger as much a negotiation of influence and identity as it was a structural redesign.”
In many ways, this created an environment where the creation of UN Women felt more like an opportunity than threat for those involved. This is not to suggest that there weren’t disagreements or sticking points along the way, but to emphasize that having a constituency for reform is vital – all the more so when one considers that in the case of the UN, effective reform almost always requires the support of both the Secretary-General and the UN Secretariat as well as Member States through the General Assembly.
This should also serve as something of an alarm bell for the current UN80 process. Given the tight timeline at the end of this Secretary-General’s term and the rapidly mounting budget pressures, the UN80 process has allowed little time or space for Member States to genuinely align their positions, calibrate their ambitions, and to lead the charge on pushing for those UN reforms that will be most effective. This also helps explain why some of the more ambitious reforms to overhaul the UN system have not been put on the table to date – without a constituency of Member States to advocate for dramatic change, such proposals would simply get bogged down in the lame duck period of a departing Secretary-General. In short, it is hard to drive effective, sweeping change without an affirmative vision for what all involved are hoping to achieve.
If the UN is to truly modernize its operations and make them fit for purpose, there is simply no substitute for the patient work of diplomacy and consultation needed to shape agreements around the core tenets of such reform. UN Women was ultimately possible because it was cast from the outset as a way to elevate gender issues, as a net gain for the United Nations and gender, rather than as a loss, collapse of existing entities, or purely as a means to cut jobs and budgets.
Merging the four institutions that comprise UN Women was a long process.
The need for diplomatic alignment is clear when we look at the case of UN Women. Although the new organization was relatively small, with less than 1,000 staff at inception, negotiations over its creation stretched out over several years in what Charlesworth and Chinkin called a “fraught process.” It then took several years of dedicated work and change management to get the new organization off the ground as it continued its work even as it was being restructured. So, in total, the better part of five years was spent discussing the merits of creating UN Women, getting the proper authorities in place, and then fully launching the organization.
This is a notable contrast to the current UN80 process which, as currently constructed, is an 18-month sprint involving a whole panoply of agencies and budgets in what is the final year of the Secretary-General’s term. Viewed from this perspective, it is self-evident that the next Secretary-General will find many of these same reform and budget issues on their plate.
Outside voices were important and the UN should avoid insular approaches to reform – another cautionary note for UN80.
In part because there was both significant Member State debate about the creation of UN Women and considerable civil society interest in the issue, a good deal of outside expertise was injected into the discussion about UN Women’s mandate, its potential operations, and preferred structure. The role of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on System-wide Coherence, which issued its final report in 2006, is again of note here, with the panel including a number of prime ministerial level members as an important first step in building momentum for a merged entity to address gender issues. In addition, a reasonable number of outside experts were brought in to help manage UN Women once it was created. Author Saraswathi Menon notes that all but one member of the newly constituted UN Women’s senior management came from outside the previous offices.
While listening to outside voices and viewpoints takes time and can be challenging, and even divisive in some cases, it also adds enormous value.
In general, most bureaucracies are reluctant to put bold steps for restructuring on the table themselves, and in a merger, outside voices bring a level of impartiality to the discussions. In many cases, such voices also bring considerable expertise to the table, including some who are veterans of the organizations themselves that are able to offer blunt, real-world insight and analysis that current staff are simply not in a position to share.
In this case as well, we see some of the limits of the current UN80 process. The UN80 approach largely left it to UN agencies themselves to develop potential reform proposals. Such an insular process, while surfacing a number of useful steps forward, is highly unlikely to put transformational change on the table at a time when the need for transformational change has never been more profound.
The creation of UN Women was widely viewed as a success.
There seems to be general agreement in the literature and among practitioners that creating UN Women represented an improvement from having the four different bodies which preceded it.
A meta synthesis of UN Women evaluations suggests some strengths for the organization, as well as several weaknesses. This evaluation of evaluations argues that UN Women has been effective in “establishing clarity on roles and governance structure, harnessing implementation synergies and leveraging the comparative advantages of partners.” The evaluation argues that this allows joint programs to “build on ongoing or complementary initiatives and reduce operational costs while improving implementation efficiency.” These are exactly the types of improvements that factors Member States hoped to achieve when merging together the four institutions with overlapping mandates on women.
However, it is important to note that the assessment also observed that a significant number of evaluations considered “the inadequacy of resources (human, financial and technical) allocated to coordination work” as a consistent impediment. This is important to note in the current environment: those efficiency gains achieved by merging these institutions together was not some silver bullet that magically resolved funding challenges around women’s issues at the UN.
Author Saraswathi Menon some of UN Women’s most important steps came early in its tenure, In Menon’s view:
The first three years, under the strong leadership of Michelle Bachelet…focused on institution building, setting priorities, and engaging with such critical international processes as Rio+20 and the Fourth International Conference on Aid Effectiveness. One achievement was the rapid implementation of regional offices and an expanded country presence mirroring the arrangements of other UN development organizations. Staff from the predecessor organizations received assignments within the new structure and were complemented by new recruits.
Menon also suggests that UN Women’s “seat at the country-team table increased engagement with the rest of the UN development system” and that “The interagency group of gender offices in all UN organizations was reactivated, and a framework for accountability (the System-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality) was adopted, and each UN organization required to set targets and self-monitor and report performance on a common set of indicators.”
Of course, UN Women has also faced its share of challenges. There has been a growing backlash against gender equality in many countries in recent years, and this has often been accompanied by shrinking space for civil society and human rights organizations.
But the bottom line for today’s reform efforts is that a well-designed restructure backed by a relatively clear vision and broad political and diplomatic support can lead to more effective operations. In particular, UN Women is also a welcome reminder that focusing on effectiveness in the field and at the country level is a welcome first principle for reform efforts. In an era when it is under considerable pressure to demonstrate the impact of its work, the UN needs to approach reform through the lens of what these changes would mean in the field.
But concerns about its mandate, and the tension between normative support for gender and more specific technical operational support, were never fully resolved, and Member States essentially split the loaf.
The mandate that created UN Women was something of a diplomatic hedge, and it adopted an approach that was less aggressive in promoting norms than some women’s rights advocates would have preferred. And in turn UN Women, in general, has interpreted its mandate in a way that some women’s rights advocates see as excessively proscribed – although many Member States may not. Charlesworth and Chinkin argue that UN Women does not see its role as challenging “the global structures that sustain women’s subordination. Rather it creates a pool of expertise to address routine forms of discrimination against women, to offer technical assistance and expert knowledge to states, with respect to issues such as law and judicial reform, governance, capacity building and gender budgeting.” And while the authors may be unhappy with such an approach, there is not much evidence that Member States would have supported UN Women playing an aggressively more normative role.
As the UN Staff College report argues, “These foundational choices – balancing normative ambition with operational pragmatism – set the tone for how UN Women would engage with Member States, manage internal transitions, and assert its role within the broader UN system.
This highlights the risks and rewards of putting extended debates about mandates on the table in the current reform environment, a time when geopolitical tensions are running high, there is considerable hunger by the Global South for greater power sharing in multilateral institutions, and consensus around normative issues will be challenging to strike. This also places a premium on reforms that help the UN execute functions that enjoy broad support, such as feeding the hungry, promoting peace, and helping protect children.
Accomplished senior leadership was vital in getting UN Women off of the ground.
And as in any bureaucratic effort, people were ultimately as important as the organigram. Numerous observers argue the fact that UN Women’s first Executive Director, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, had considerable political heft and diplomatic skill that was central to its relatively successful early tenure. And by that same token, many felt that the institution's stature and effectiveness slipped to a significant degree with her departure from UN Women in 2013.
One of the key challenges for the next Secretary-General from the virtual onset of their term will be putting in place the people both within the UN Secretariat and in helping guide agencies that are not only committed to reform but highly capable of executing such reforms – and all the change management that it entails.
Effective change management and culture building were worth the investment.
Merging disparate organizations together is ultimately the first step in a process, not its last. And how such change is introduced, managed and implemented often has as much to do with an organization’s relative success as does its blueprint. Almost all of the sources reviewed in preparing this report gave UN Women relatively high marks for its approach to change management in its early years.
The UN Staff College observed that many of the staffers in the new organization, unsurprisingly, felt a good deal of distress and uncertainty as a result of the merger, “Leadership had to acknowledge this emotional dimension and create space for dialogue, dissent, and healing. They did so by actively engaging staff in town halls, listening sessions, and retreats, where concerns could be voiced and addressed. Leaders also recognized the symbolic importance of institutional identity, such as names and logos, and treated these not as trivialities but as meaningful expressions of belonging and legacy.”
The need for effective change management is even more acute in the current environment, particularly given that agencies are already dealing with across-the-board budget cuts and feel, not without cause, that their vocations and important work are under siege.
Conclusion
While every UN agency is unique and the current environment is substantially different than 2010, there are many clear lessons to be gleaned from the creation of UN Women. It is virtually indisputable that the UN system – like it or not – has entered a period of significant change and turmoil. And if Member States want to see the UN system emerge from this period as more modern and able to meet a new generation of challenges, it should embrace these lessons by engaging a genuine debate about the most meaningful reforms that should be on the table, uniting diverse voices around a shared vision, developing meaningful coalitions for reform, listening to outside experts, prioritizing the importance of field operations, and by empowering skilled, effective leaders to manage change.