The Next Secretary-General Needs a Geneva Strategy

While the UN is grappling with financial strain, geopolitical fragmentation and growing pressure to demonstrate its relevance, attention over recent months has largely focused on institutional downsizing and leadership selection. 

UN80 reforms have mandated system-wide efficiencies, and the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review (PBAR) resolutions have placed renewed emphasis on the need for system-wide coherence, stronger links between policy and implementation at the country level and measurable peacebuilding impact. Both have their critics, yet both also recognize the need for a shift in how the UN understands and uses its architecture so that all parts of the system contribute to shared objectives.

In this context, candidates for the next Secretary-General are being asked to articulate bold visions for the organization’s future: how it will respond to proliferating crises, navigate great power rivalries, and deliver on its core mandates with fewer resources. 

The challenge is significant: with peace operations contracting and international political consensus harder to achieve, the UN is struggling to operate in a landscape increasingly defined by fragmented and transactional diplomacy, decreased donor support and fast-moving, interconnected risks. While UN80 reforms were intended to address some of these challenges, in practice the process has concentrated more on short-term efficiencies than on the deeper institutional shifts required to address these complex problems effectively. 

If the next Secretary-General is to revitalize the UN and face the challenges ahead, they will also need to build on what works – and much of that is found in Geneva. 

They will also need a clear strategy centred around five key elements: stronger institutional connections between Geneva and New York; clearer pathways for field-to-policy uptake; more integrated cross-pillar analysis and decision-making; improved cross-sectoral crisis prevention and response mechanisms; and a renewed UN commitment to peacemaking. 

Geneva: An Underused System Asset

The debate around Geneva’s place in the multilateral landscape is often framed as a question of political relevance. Compared to New York, where the Security Council dominates decision-making, Geneva can appear removed from the political centre of gravity. This leads to a familiar concern – that Geneva risks being sidelined as peace processes move elsewhere and new diplomatic hubs emerge.

But Geneva is not simply a secondary UN hub. It brings together one of the system’s largest concentrations of operational, normative and technical expertise, spanning human rights, humanitarian action, health, labour, trade, disarmament, climate and emerging technologies.

Over decades, a dense ecosystem of diverse actors and multistakeholder cooperation has developed around these domains. This includes more than 40 UN agencies and international organizations, over 180 Permanent Missions, hundreds of non-governmental organizations, plus research institutes, think tanks, networks, international financial institutions and private sector actors. This unique ecosystem provides access to early warning data, policy research, technological innovation and diplomatic engagement – a toolbox of expertise and field-level engagement that can be mobilized to address many of today’s most complex challenges. Downplaying the value of that ecosystem will cost the UN more than what it hopes to gain by moving a portion of staff to Bonn or Nairobi. 

Missed Opportunities for Improved Peacebuilding and Prevention

The importance of Geneva to the UN system is particularly visible in the fields of international peace, security and conflict prevention.

The UN has repeatedly emphasized the importance of addressing the root causes of conflict, of investing in early action and of “sustaining peace” through prevention, long-term risk management and cross-pillar approaches. The PBAR Resolutions in particular have emphasized the need for more inclusive, innovative and effective peacebuilding and prevention at the country level.

Geneva’s ecosystem of humanitarian, development and peacebuilding expertise offers specific assets to support this effort, among which is the generation of global data and operational insights regarding the key drivers of instability and conflict – from human rights abuses and land conflicts to climate pressures, weak institutions and economic shocks, to the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies that threaten to exacerbate these drivers if not adequately governed. These are the kinds of problems and risks that the next Secretary-General will need to grapple with if substantive progress in conflict prevention and peacebuilding is to be made. And they require intelligent, integrated and sustained institutional responses. 

Here as well, Geneva-based actors—collaborating with international, national and local partners across all sectors—have deep insights, models and tools to share regarding effective ways to address drivers of conflict, including field-tested strategies for improved policy and practice in diverse contexts. The risk is that these strengths remain underutilized unless deliberately positioned within the UN’s core decision-making processes.

At present, UN policy mechanisms, processes, tools and incentives offer limited pathways for these insights to feed into political analysis and decision-making in New York. A key example is the underuse of human rights data to anticipate and prevent conflict. Although the data exists, the wider system isn’t using it effectively. The result is a UN system that is rich in information but poorly organized to learn from and act on it. 

Reform is Not Just About What, But About How

When candidates for the next Secretary-General debated recently in Geneva, all recognized the UN’s delivery and implementation gaps, including failing to act upon early warning signs and to better connect field-level realities with decision-making at the policy level. 

If the UN hopes to emerge from the present crises stronger, it needs not only to leverage the different parts of its own house better, but to recognize the value proposition of the specialised ecosystems that have evolved around it. 

Although New York remains the centre of UN political authority, it does not have a monopoly on peacebuilding intelligence. International Geneva is vital to the UN system because it generates forms of knowledge, trust, convening power and operational experience that New York cannot produce on its own. As additional hubs gain importance in the multilateral landscape, the UN system may need to move away from a centre-periphery model towards a more networked peacebuilding landscape. Before that, a clearer view of the distinct assets they offer is needed, together with a strategy for deploying those assets to the greatest effect. 

In that direction, the next Secretary-General should give priority to changing how headquarters and hubs interact on the issues of peace and prevention. This would include moving from ad hoc exchanges to structured pathways for coordination and decision-making; from siloed expertise to stronger cross-pillar analysis of interconnected risks and leverage points; from separate sectoral mandates to integrated regional and country-level strategies; and from diplomatic decline to renewed UN leadership on peace negotiations. They should also place greater emphasis on cross-sectoral innovation – including expanding the role of peace tech, peace finance and science policy, and working more creatively with national governments and local actors to improve the lives of people living in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

Geneva is well-positioned to enable these shifts. It offers a safe space where political, technical, humanitarian and economic communities can interact, and where research, policy and operational capacities, that often remain fragmented elsewhere, come together.

A Strategy for Geneva

The upcoming election of a new Secretary General presents an opportunity to define a strategy for how the Geneva ecosystem can contribute more systematically to the UN’s effectiveness as a whole: a strategy that takes stock of where expertise and authority sit, of how knowledge and influence flow, and how impact is generated.

Five recommendations to take this strategy forward include: 

• Stronger institutional connections between Geneva and New York. Designing new mechanisms, where needed, to systematically link Geneva-based operational and normative expertise with UN political processes.
• Clearer pathways for field-to-policy uptake. Designing clearer channels and tools to translate field-based insights from across the Geneva ecosystem into strategic UN policy and programme discussions.
• Stronger incentives for joint analysis and decision-making in both New York and Geneva, so that cross-sectoral analysis systematically informs regional and country-level strategies for prevention and peacebuilding.
• A coherent crisis response plan. Including a cross-sectoral “crisis response platform” able to coordinate responses when complex risks begin to materialize.
• Renewed commitment to peacemaking. With peace processes increasingly being led outside the UN, the Secretary-General should put political proposals on the table that restore the organization’s relevance and credibility as a diplomatic actor.

Leveraging the Geneva Ecosystem More Effectively 

Geneva’s future will not be determined by the number of institutions based there, nor by the volume of meetings it hosts. It will depend on whether its role is valued and leveraged effectively within a UN system that is increasingly under strain.

The question now is whether the next Secretary-General will push the UN to evolve from a collection of strong but fragmented parts to an integrated system that is strategically aligned, operationally connected and capable of translating knowledge into action. The recommendations outlined here offer some strategic steps in the right direction.