It Could Have Been "UN Learning". It's "UNICLI". A story about good intentions that stopped too early.
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The UNITAR–UNSSC (Staff College) merger now before Member States, laid out in the Secretary-General’s advance report of 24 July 2026, is not a new idea. Over a decade ago, when I was at what was then DOCO (Development Operations Coordination Office) — now DCO (Development Coordination Office) — this exact consolidation came up. The ambition then was arguably larger, touching other UN research and learning bodies, not just these two. It went nowhere.
It’s older than that, too. In November 1996, the Second Committee was already debating how UNITAR and the newly proposed Staff College should relate to each other and already split along the same lines: administrative logic pointing one way, institutional turf pointing the other.
Three things killed it. The first was personalities: people protecting their own position and their institution’s. Understandable up to a point. I can respect someone defending an institution they built. What I can’t excuse is using that defense as cover to block progress the system needed, for personal gain. The second was culture. UNSSC and UNITAR have always run on different institutional cultures, and the UN has never figured out how to reconcile culture across its own house (this is not unique to UNSSC and UNITAR). The third, and the one that mattered most, was purpose. Nobody ever settled what the merged entity was actually for. Efficiency isn’t a purpose, it’s an outcome. When an institution doesn’t know what it’s for, everyone inside defends the version of “for“ that protects their own turf.
That’s the test I’m applying to the current proposal: not whether the merger makes administrative sense, but whether it answers the strategic question the last attempt never did.
What the proposal gets right
Stripped to its mechanics, the report is sound. UNITAR becomes the legal successor to the Staff College. A single statute replaces two overlapping mandates. There’s one door for staff and Member States to knock on. That single door could be one of the few structural moves that starts closing the cultural gap that killed the idea the first time. The consolidation instinct is correct. What it hasn’t done is answer the purpose question any better than we did a decade ago. It has answered the administrative question: efficiency. The report itself claims otherwise. It states that the business case rests on strategic value, not cost savings alone, and that efficiencies “are not the principal rationale.“ The numbers say otherwise: a projected $5.5–7 million in annual savings, $9.5–13 million in transition costs, and a target headcount of roughly 153 positions, a 26 percent cut from the 2025 baseline. These are good reasons but building a business case around cutting a quarter of the workforce is an efficiency argument, whatever the report calls it.
The irony of who wrote the manual
In October 2025, the UNSSC Lab for Organizational Change and Knowledge (UNLOCK) published a paper called Merging for Impact, distilling lessons from the UN Women merger into a practical framework for future reform. It argues that mergers succeed or fail on strategic clarity, political navigation, and cultural integration, not cost savings. It warns explicitly that framing reform as efficiency gets read by staff as code for job cuts, breeding the resistance that sinks mergers.
The paper also names leadership humility — senior figures stepping back voluntarily — as one of the most overlooked, decisive ingredients in whether a merger becomes real transformation or a turf war.
The institution that wrote a playbook for merging is now the one being merged, with little evidence in the report that its playbook was applied to it. That’s not a knock on the paper. It’s a good paper and one of the pieces of evidence in this debate that UNSSC brings something distinctive a purely administrative merger could flatten.
Who merges who?
This shouldn't be a story about who merges whom even though the Shifting Paradigms: United to Deliver already prevented any discussion on this given paragraph 89 states “We plan to merge UN Staff System College (UNSSC) into the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) with the goal of harmonizing governance, modernizing digital platforms and expanding training opportunities for UN personnel and Member States”. Before any discussion was held, the decision was already made. In the end, it should be about what comes out of the merger, now who absorbs who.
In this case the pendulum swings back and forth. Today Geneva, UNITAR’s home, keeps the headquarters. Turin, the Staff College’s home, becomes “a learning campus.” And Bonn would “continue to provide a relevant presence in a United Nations sustainable development hub”, whatever that means in practice. The Knowledge Centre for Sustainable Development based in Bonn is where the Staff College reinvented itself, grew exponentially in terms of outreach and partnerships and became a centre of gravity for UN learning providing training for several UN entities acting de facto as a bridge between different UN cultures as well. (Note that all 3 are based in the Global North)
Thirty years ago the fear ran the other way. When the Staff College project was first floated in 1996, UNITAR’s own Board Chair complained that the Secretary-General’s report devoted most of its attention to this “largely untested” newcomer, at the expense of the institution Member States had actually built. Today the newcomer has become the surviving name and the senior partner’s headquarters, and the institution that built the reputation worth protecting gets “a learning campus.” The particular imbalance has just flipped.
There's even more irony underneath the irony. In 2020, the JIU's own system-wide review of UN learning proposed consolidating around the Staff College, not UNITAR. It recommended "the upgrading and consolidation of the role of the United Nations System Staff College as a system-wide knowledge management and learning institution, through the strengthening of its mandate and the enhancement of its resources."
Five years later, it all went the other way. Nobody has explained why the system's own evaluators pointed one direction and the merger went the other. Three different moments, three different answers to "who's on top" and not one of them tells you what the merged entity is actually supposed to do.
Purpose, not efficiency, is the right test
This merger is indeed symptomatic of earlier experiences. Redesigning boxes instead of redesigning functions. Merge two entities, rename the box, reduce the headcount, call it reform without asking what function the system actually needs performed, by whom, and why. That’s what happened to this idea in 2013. It’s what I unfortunately see happening again now, just with better process design around it.
I’ve made a version of this argument before, at a larger scale. In From Aid Supplier to Partnership Enabler, I sketched a Data and Analytics Cluster that would bring the roughly thirty UN entities focused on training, learning and research — UNSSC, UNITAR, UNU, UNRISD, and others — under one roof, rather than negotiating them two at a time. That’s the version of this reform that answers the purpose question: not “how do we merge UNITAR and the Staff College,” but “what does the UN system need its learning and research function to do, and which institutional shape delivers that.” Measured against that standard, this merger is a modest, useful step in the right direction. But it shouldn’t be the final destination.
What the report does is merge the two entities with no institutional defenders – UNITAR and UNSSC are bodies nobody was fighting to keep separate – and then stop. Secretariat learning stays where it is. Entities keep running their own training. DCO’s RC learning stays where it is. Ambition is lacking as this is just consolidation of the easy part. This isn’t even a new recommendation. The 1996 report on UNITAR’s Turin relocation proposed exactly this: a comprehensive, system-wide study of UN training institutions, to be commissioned by the General Assembly. It went nowhere. Three decades later, the system is doing the two-entity version of the same idea it once declined to do properly.
A little sidestep: purpose can also be created in an exciting new name. It could lay out also future ambitions. What if we called the new institution UN Learning? Instead, the proposal is the United Nations Institute for Capability and Learning Innovation or UNICLI. If we want purpose and some excitement around that, is the right step to call an institution like something that sounds like a spreadsheet macro?
UNITAR has been here before. Ahmad Kamal, the then Permanent Representative of Pakistan, and the Chairman of UNITAR’s Board of Trustees in the same 1996 debate, recalled that the acronym used to be read around UN corridors as “United Nations institute for the tired and retired,” before a change in leadership and location turned the institution around. Bad-name jokes are a UN tradition older than either of us. UNICLI just continues it.
The funding model is where the lack of ambition shows most
The report is explicit: the Institute is established on a voluntary funding, self-financed, cost-recovery basis, with no reliance on assessed contributions or additional core funding. That’s a deliberate choice and a defensible one for anyone who’s spent time in the Fifth Committee. There are some fights you would rather not have, but maybe we should…
I wrote in The Reform Trap about how UN80’s tempo rewards documents that stay technically correct and politically safe over ones that name a hard trade-off plainly. Ruling out assessed contributions without ever putting the case for them on the table is that same evasion. It comes at a cost. An institution whose survival depends entirely on what Member States and UN entities choose to pay for, case by case, will always lose its system-wide public goods — leadership development, RC-system training, mainstreaming functions — to the more brandable, more reportable, agency-specific training donors actually want their name on. That’s the same earmarking pathology that shows up everywhere else in this system’s financing. It’s not a coincidence it shows up here too.
A better design would be tiered: a small assessed or shared-cost base, the way RC system costs are shared across entities by formula, or the way JIU is funded by its participating organizations to guarantee a protected core curriculum — with cost recovery and voluntary funding layered on top for bespoke work. That’s not radical; it already exists elsewhere in the system, including in how UNSSC itself has functioned successfully for the last decade (e.g. UN entities pay for the service they get from the UNSSC). Its absence here suggests either nobody argued for it during drafting, or the Member States who’d have to fund the base preferred to keep the current arrangement, which leaves them in control of what gets resourced.
Structured cooperation isn’t good enough
The report’s answer to the research-institute question is that the new entity would access research through “structured cooperation” with the UN research pillar — UNU, regional commissions, other research bodies — via a joint system coordination mechanism still to be established. On its own, that phrase reads thin. Whether it actually is thin is a different question: the detailed design of that mechanism sits in a separate, related workstream (Action 72), so this report may simply not be the place where its substance was ever going to appear.
If the mechanism is further along than this text suggests, it should be easy to show: a mandate, a governance structure, a timeline, something more than an intention to cooperate. Until that surfaces, “structured cooperation” is doing a lot of work for a phrase with no visible content behind it in the document that’s actually in front of Member States right now.
The stakes are real either way. Training that isn’t continuously fed by current research calcifies into doctrine long after the evidence has moved on. Research that never reaches training never reaches the practitioners who could use it. A standing joint programming mechanism with UNU, a formal role for research institutes in validating training content, or a joint fund tying specific modules to specific research outputs would each settle the question convincingly. Any of those would tell us the linkage is real. Right now, this report doesn’t.
A genuine side question, and not one this report needs to answer to be sound: is a standalone research institute even the right vehicle for this, in an era where the more constrained resource is senior policy advisors embedded where decisions are made? I’ve read a fair number of UN research institute outputs over the years, and the research itself is genuinely good. What I’m less sure of is whether it needs a dedicated institute to produce it, rather than two other paths: a closer, more deliberate partnership with academic institutions already doing this work, or embedding that research capacity directly inside the UN entities that would actually use it — the same entities that chronically lack access to senior policy advice in the first place. Neither question gets settled by this merger. But “the research pillar needs a stronger link to training” quietly assumes the research pillar’s current institutional form is the right starting point. I’m not convinced that’s obviously true.
The real test
The idea behind this merger has been right for over a decade. What killed it the first time wasn’t a bad idea, it was the absence of an agreed purpose, which let personalities and unreconciled cultures finish the job. UN80 has done the easy version: merging the two entities nobody was defending, under a report that insists efficiency isn’t the point while building its business case on a 26 percent staff cut.
The harder, more honest version is still available: a genuine UN system wide learning service provider, funded to protect its public-goods core, structurally linked to the knowledge generation it depends on. Whether that happens will tell us whether this reform was ever about purpose at all, or just about the accounting.
To conclude
A former UNSSC Director involved in the 2013 discussions recently gave his view on the merger, titled plainly: “My Advice. Slow Down.” There’s a distinction worth drawing here. As I wrote in The Reform Trap, UN80 often moves too fast to think: it produces vague, evasive documents precisely because nobody was given protected time to name political trade-offs plainly. That kind of slowness — deliberate, time-bound, aimed at honest diagnosis — is what good reform actually needs. It is not what “slow down” is asking for here. The slowness that killed this merger the first time wasn’t protected deliberation. It was personalities and unreconciled cultures filling a vacuum that an unresolved purpose left behind, for over a decade. Those are not the same kind of slow, and conflating them is how good reform gets talked out of existence in the language of caution.
Don’t slow down in that second sense. Think through the options properly, and give the process the protected time it needs to do so honestly. Make the difficult calls, even the ones some people won’t like. Had the right decisions been made in 2013, the UN wouldn’t need to rush anything now — it would already be done. That’s not caution. That’s the same blockage wearing a different argument.
Quote that struck me…
“Mergers are like marriages. They are the bringing together of two individuals. If you wouldn’t marry someone for the ‘operational efficiencies’ they offer in the running of a household, then why would you combine two companies with unique cultures and identities for that reason?”
Simon Sinek
Retired, but not tired. Thanks much for this unfinished piece. Interesting, at first, yet rather « taking us - again - away from « what matters: peace, social change and human rights. « Away-from » unprecedented forms of violence which overtly reject respect for human dignity. « Away-from « the elemental paradigms that tried-to build a UNO. Not even challenging the non-validities in the SDGs erroneously heralded as the pathway to thread. Seemingly tolerating the moral injustices - and injuries - that hurt our grandchildren deeply. With no reference to our duty to resist. Ce dont nous avons besoin est une rupture, afin que tout compromis puisse exister sans compromission.