The Problem

The United Nations was designed for a world that no longer exists. Most current reform efforts, including the UN80 process, ask how to make the existing system work better. That is necessary, but no longer sufficient. The system’s fundamental design no longer matches the challenges it faces. The problem is not primarily managerial. It is structural.

Four interconnected structural deficits define the present crisis.

• First, the system’s capacity to enforce the Charter’s prohibition against interstate aggression has eroded.
• Second, the UN faces a functional mismatch between a state-centric institutional design and transnational, intergenerational challenges, compounded by private actors whose power increasingly rivals that of states yet falls outside any adequate multilateral accountability framework.
• Third, the Security Council depends on great-power consensus that does not exist, leaving much of the world’s population without meaningful influence over decisions that affect them.
• Fourth, the organisation’s financial dependence allows assessed and voluntary contributions to be withheld or threatened as political leverage. These deficits are interconnected and cumulative. Addressing them requires not adjustment but redesign.

The Project

UN reinvention does not mean starting from scratch or discarding what works. Some agencies and operational mechanisms have proven effective and should be preserved and strengthened. The question is which institutional arrangements remain fit for purpose, which must be adapted, and which need to be fundamentally redesigned.

This joint Toda / Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation research project commissions six policy papers that move from diagnosis to design. Each paper takes one structural problem and produces concrete institutional proposals, not further analysis of why the system is failing, but specified alternatives: who decides, on what basis, through what mechanism, and with what accountability. The UN80 process, the selection of the next Secretary-General, and the September 2026 General Assembly together create a convergence this project is designed to inform and, where possible, shape.

The six papers will be developed through a working group process and a final in-person convening in Uppsala, Sweden, co-hosted with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in late August 2026, with publication timed to UNGA High-Level Week, 22 to 28 September 2026.

This project builds on the Toda Peace Institute report From Reform to Reinvention: Reimagining the United Nations for the 21st Century. It is intended to contribute to wider international discussions on the future of multilateral governance in the lead-up to UNGA 2026 and the selection of the next Secretary-General.