At a recent ODI discussion on UN Reform, ICVA’s Chair Nimo Hassan reflected on how funding the UN mainly for operational delivery, rather than its normative role, crowds out local actors and pushes the UN to focus on areas beyond its unique value. Here are her summary remarks.
9th September 2025, Bern
“Let us remind ourselves: despite its flaws, if the United Nations did not exist, we would invent it.
There is no other forum where the world can collectively address climate change, pandemics, or mass migration. For the UN to fulfil this mission, it must be properly funded.
But here is the problem: most donor funding today does not support the UN to play its unique role. Instead of prioritising its normative function: convening power, setting standards, providing technical expertise, framing global discourse, funding is heavily weighted toward operational delivery.
This creates two damaging effects.
First, it shifts the UN into direct service provision, competing with NGOs and national systems, rather than enabling them. To those who say that the UN’s value proposition is that they are the “boots on the ground,” The reality is that it is local NGOs, civil society, and host governments who are truly the boots on the ground.
When the UN becomes the default implementer, civil society and governments, who are closer to the communities, more sustainable, and in many cases more efficient, are pushed to the margins. In other words, funding the UN for delivery crowds out the very local actors we need to strengthen if we are serious about resilience.
Second, it distorts incentives inside the UN. Agencies chase earmarked, short-term, projectised funding tied to donor priorities. This leads to mandate creep, where agencies expand into areas outside their comparative advantage simply to secure resources. Instead of focusing on convening power, normative leadership, or system coordination, they build delivery arms. The result is duplication, fragmentation, and inefficiency.
Donors often justify this approach because they want large partners who can absorb big grants with low risk.
When the UN becomes the default implementer, civil society and governments, who are closer to the communities, more sustainable, and in many cases more efficient, are pushed to the margins. In other words, funding the UN for delivery crowds out the very local actors we need to strengthen if we are serious about resilience.
The risk they are concerned with is corruption and there’s a commonly held, but false perception, that local actors are more likely to be corrupt. Corruption is not determined by where an organisation is from. In fact, some of the most public cases have involved both UN scandals and INGO corruption. It’s dangerous to generalise and paint all national NGOs with the same brush, especially since many national NGOs are already compliant with high standards and successfully delivering multi-million-dollar programs.
Donor funding approaches reinforce concentration of funding at the top of the system and assumes that resources will eventually trickle down.
In practice, those funds often arrive in the form of restrictive subcontracts for NGOs, minimal overhead, rigid logframes, unrealistic timelines, leaving national actors weakened, not strengthened.
This is why trust in the multilateral system is fraying:
Donors see inefficiency and duplication. Agencies compete rather than collaborate. And at the same time, donors themselves fuel the cycle by relying on earmarked contributions that reflect their national agenda rather than global priorities. Parallel bilateral initiatives, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), Europe’s Global Gateway, pull resources even further away from multilateral coordination. The more fragmented the system becomes, the less governable it is.
But there is another way.
We now have evidence of alternative funding models. Intermediary mechanisms, civil society consortia, pooled funds, NGO- and women-led networks, are already scaling. They can absorb millions. They strengthen local capacities while delivering results in fragile, high-risk contexts. They ensure that aid reaches actors embedded in communities, building trust, ownership, and resilience.
So what should donors do?
- Shift funding from short-term, operational delivery to predictable, flexible financing to the best placed actor, which is often a national or local partner. Donors need to recognise that trust is a two way street. It has to go both ways. Donors need to deliver on their commitments to localisation.
- Support the UN to do what only it can do, set norms, convene, coordinate, provide global technical expertise, while resourcing local actors to lead delivery. This unlocks the strengths of both: the UN as a global platform, civil society as the backbone of national resilience.
That is how we avoid crowding out local actors, restore trust in the multilateral system, and build solutions that are both effective today and sustainable tomorrow.
