For many of us – UN staff – internal management reform is not as interesting or important as the politics of the Middle East, anti-narcotics work on the Afghan-Tajik border, or planning food distribution in Sudan. But we need to focus more on internal reform because the cumulative impact of low level problems on our work is immense.

We waste resources on muddled administrative processes and needless reporting. Some of us lose motivation because we are badly managed and projects are struck by crises that better planning could have averted. Jobs go undone because rigid human resource rules prevent managers transferring personnel rapidly from one post to another to meet a sudden need. This all adds up to an organisation that is becoming less effective as a partner, and less attractive as an employer. We must reverse that trend.

First, Member States must decouple political debates about what the UN should do from efforts to change how it works internally. Member State representatives should consider internal management reform proposals on their merits, and support the UN’s managers and advisors in their efforts to make the organisation more efficient and effective. Internal change then becomes our – all UN staff persons’ – responsibility.

We can do much to make our corners of the UN work better. In this report, the LLP’s 1st, we make 32 suggestions. UN managers and staff could implement nearly all of them without spending a lot of money and without having to seek Member State approval.

Given that the Secretary-General has ordered a sweeping review of many UN entities’ and programmes’ mandates, it is quite sensible that a spending cap has been imposed in lieu of a two-year, status quo budget. Hopefully, negotiations on management reform will resume in early 2006 with less of the North-South divide that seems to be characterizing much of the debate of late.