Ministry Statements & Speeches:
Thank you Mx President, tēnā koutou rangatira mā!
New Zealand would like to express its sincere appreciation to the team behind the JIU review of governance and oversight and underline the significance we believe this initiative has for the better functioning of the Funds and Programmes.
These are difficult times, when the Funds and Programmes must balance competing priorities. We hope that better governance practice will help us, as Member States, to better provide strategic guidance to the leadership teams, as well as strengthening our collective sense of ownership, responsibility and purpose.
As the UNDP Administrator observed at the Joint Meeting of the Boards on Friday, it is a real challenge for all Member States, but particularly those of us with small Foreign Ministries, to stay abreast of the UN’s many important workstreams. It is therefore crucial that we seize this opportunity to ensure that Board governance is robust without being unduly onerous. The right systems will enable inclusive participation by Member States.
Informed by the JIU’s findings, Board governance reforms – including clearly delineated responsibilities and harmonised reporting – should ensure all stakeholders know what information they need, the enterprise risks involved, and the extent of their own mandate. We hope harmonised reporting will also make it easier to identify trends, lessons, best practice and opportunities for cooperation across the Funds and Programmes. No agency should have to reinvent the wheel.
We recognise that expectations and practice have evolved since the governance arrangements of the Funds and Programmes were established. It is our responsibility as Member States to ensure that the discomforts of UN reform are not borne solely by UN agencies. Harmonised governance is a tangible contribution by Member States to ensure the UN is future-fit. We must hold ourselves to the same high standards we demand.
New Zealand has pondered past failures by Executive Boards to identify or properly interrogate risks, failures that led to the loss of public funds or inadequate protections for vulnerable individuals. Rightly or wrongly, any failure of this sort, in any part of the UN, affects public confidence in multilateralism more broadly. This has implications for funding, with consequent impacts on the system’s ability to deliver the SDGs.
Together with the Kingdom of the Netherlands, New Zealand has proposed draft decision language to maintain momentum towards reform. Reflecting the cross-Board nature of the review, and without taking a position on the content of the review itself, the draft decisions propose an inclusive cross-Board modality to consider the JIU’s recommendations.
As they should be, the recommendations are ambitious. Not all of them can be designed or implemented at pace. And it may be that not all of them are found to be feasible. But we hope that the establishment of a cross-Board, cross-regional working group, comprising both well-resourced and lightly-resourced Member States, will be able to establish a pragmatic workplan to triage the recommendations, with regular opportunities to report back to the Boards for direction and decisions that deliver coherent, incremental improvements.
Better governance must deliver tangible benefits and sharpen the Funds and Programmes’ focus on the Sustainable Development Goals. As the Māori proverb says, Ki te kahore he whakakitenga, ka ngaro te iwi – without foresight or vision, the people will be lost. Thank you.