The United Nations serves three vital roles: as a meeting ground for the world’s governments, as a kind of secretariat for global goals and treaties, and as a provider of urgent public goods when national governments cannot or do not provide them (such as emergency relief operations and peacekeeping when national governments have collapsed or are overwhelmed by conflicts or natural disasters). In the United States, the face of the UN is mainly in its first role, as a debating shop in the UN Security Council. In fact the UN’s most powerful contributions probably fall into the second and third categories. The UN remains the world’s repository of shared commitments on global objectives, whether in the environmental treaties, the Millennium Development Goals, or the protection against global pandemic diseases. Its agencies are the indispensable providers of public services in the poorest and most vulnerable places on the planet, a role that is almost invisible in the rich countries but nearly omnipresent in the poorest. Beyond the specific acts of peacekeeping and the countless individual development initiatives of UN agencies, the deepest measure of UN success will be whether the Millennium Promises are sustained over time as shared active global goals and whether these goals are achieved in practice. Given the centrality of the United Nations to this overarching challenge, the UN itself needs to be reformed to fulfil these leading tasks. For example, the Millennium Promises require action on the ground that cut across multiple UN agencies, connecting the work in agriculture of the World Food Programme and the Food and Agricultural Organisation with the public health work of the World Health Organisation and the poverty reduction work of the United National Development Programme, to name just a few of the relevant agencies.

The organisational challenge for the UN will be to press its diverse and often loosely managed institutions into a cohesive forces, thereby giving strong and creative backing to global goals. On paper, this has recently been described as the UN ‘delivering as one’. Such an outcome will sound unlikely to many, almost the opposite of what they expect from a global bureaucracy. Yet it is not impossible. If the Secretary-General charges the UN agencies, above all else, with supporting member governments to implement the global goals, UN teams operating within each of the member countries will become much more actively engaged in real problem solving. Form will then follow function with the UN itself. UN agencies would find themselves working together despite the odds, and working against the calendar and against the sceptics.

This is an edited extract from Common Wealth: Economics for a crowded planet by Jeffrey Sachs, published by Allen Lane and reproduced by permission.