Earmarked to Death
The 2025 Financing the UN Development System report, published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the MPTFO in September, records 81% of 2023 contributions to UN operational activities for development and humanitarian assistance as earmarked. Core funding was 19%. The total earmarked figure for the UN development system in 2022 was $45.6 billion, against $9 billion in core. The Fifth Committee's 2026 regular budget, adopted in December with 2,681 posts cut under UN80 Workstream 1, is $3.45 billion. The regular budget is roughly 8% of what the UN development and humanitarian system spends.
Executive boards govern core while earmarked contributions are negotiated bilaterally between individual donors and entity management at country level, through project design and oversight. The Cepei and IDOS "Triple Disconnect" study, published in February, reports that executive boards approve strategic plans covering 10-20% of actual spending. While the multilateral governance architecture, which give developing countries a formal voice, remains in place, the substantive decisions are back in donor capitals.
Earmarked contributions to UN operational activities grew from $17.8 billion in 2010 to $45.6 billion in 2022. Core funding rose from $6.1 billion to $9.7 billion over the same period, then fell to $8.6 billion in 2023. The acceleration tracks a period in which formal governance of the UN development system became more representative of programme country and G77 priorities. Each donor decision was individually defensible on domestic accountability grounds, shaped by the same results and visibility pressures reshaping how Western governments funded everything. The aggregate outcome is that donors retained substantive influence over a system whose formal authority was shifting toward the 134 countries the system is meant to serve.
Earmarking was agreed as the price of continued funding. In a period when governance bodies performed badly at prioritisation and results, it allowed donors to keep giving while bypassing structures they did not trust. Without it, DAC core contributions would have fallen further than they have.
Executive boards lost the habit of priority-setting because real priorities had migrated to donor strategies. Resident Coordinators lost the capacity to coordinate because the core resources that enabled coordination disappeared. Secretariats learned to compete for earmarks rather than negotiate mandates. The 2019 Funding Compact set a 30% target for voluntary core funding. The 2024 Funding Compact 2.0 renewed it, from an 11.6% 2022 baseline, for 2027, neither of which are on track to be met.
Funding Windows are UNDP's main mechanism for mobilising flexible, thematic funding, pooled resources designed to sit between unrestricted core and tightly earmarked bilateral agreements. An evaluation presented to the UNDP Executive Board in February found nearly 70% of Funding Windows resources earmarked to specific projects. The mechanism built to counter the pathology was re-captured by it. Donors prefer visibility, entities need resources, the pooled vehicle becomes a more flexible container for the same logic.
A pooled programme design with strategic priorities agreed at governing body level may produce donor arrangements that trade individual visibility for collective coherence (Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands continue to demonstrate this is bearable). Executive board subcommittees could provide standing oversight of earmarked portfolios and Cooperation Frameworks. Most of it requires no new mandate, just governing bodies (and the G77) to claim authority they already formally hold.
None of it is in the UN80 workstreams. Workstream 1 is cutting the regular budget. Workstreams 2 and 3, on mandate implementation and structural realignment, are deferred to the 2027 and 2028 budget cycles. The funding architecture that determines most of what the UN development system does sits outside the UN80 agenda entirely.
Member States spent three months in the Fifth Committee negotiating the 8% of the UN development system that is governed multilaterally. The 92% that is not governed multilaterally will continue to grow as the governed share shrinks.
