International Organizations and Differentiated Universality: Reinvigorating Assessed Contributions in United Nations Funding

When engaging in multilateral cooperation, states generally expect to achieve more than through individual or bilateral efforts alone. International organizations are important instruments for multilateral efforts as they allow member states to focus their endeavors in order to further common norms and standards, incentivize collaboration, and reduce the likelihood of inter-state conflict (Abbott and Snidal 1998). The idea that rights, standards, or goals agreed upon multilaterally apply to all member states, and that all member states are supposed to decide about, benefit from, and contribute to what international organizations do, is often framed with reference to the notion of universality. At the United Nations (UN), in particular, prominent frameworks such as human rights declarations or the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development have established universality as a key principle for multilateral cooperation (UNGA 1948, 2015; see Long 2015). The practical implications of universality provisions for concrete forms of collaboration, however, have been far from clear-cut. In an uneven world, there has been substantial opposition to the idea that every state should be treated the same, notably with regard to the provision of global public goods.

One particularly controversial dimension of the UN’s commitment to universality has centered around questions of member states’ fiscal responsibility toward global multilateralism: how should their financial contributions be calculated to ensure the effective functioning of an international organization while doing justice to inter-state differences? Funding is a key element of the support member states provide to international organizations, enabling them to perform their functions. In different ways, funding relates to greater multilateral autonomy and selective improvements of institutional capacities (Goetz and Patz 2017; Michaelowa 2017; Heldt and Schmidtke 2017). It is also a central means for member state influence, notably because the resource base of many multilateral bodies is precarious, and many have to invest considerable efforts in securing financial contributions in a competitive environment (see Baumann and Weinlich 2020). Such resource politics is one way for member states to increase control over international organizations (Eckhard and Dijkstra 2017; Reinsberg 2017). On the flip side, collective funding—that is, financial resources not controlled by individual donors—can be viewed as a key proxy for joint member state ownership, support, and shared commitment to multilateralism. As funding is an important source of influence, greater burden sharing among states can increase the legitimacy of international organizations, in particular if coupled with all member states contributing some of their own resources and jointly deciding how funds are spent (Graham 2017). The ways in which obligatory contributions to multilateral bodies are calculated and agreed upon, however, have so far received little attention in debates about international organization reform.¹

Against this backdrop, the article at hand focuses on member state funding input to examine the link between the UN system and the notion of universality, and how universality aspirations can be translated into concrete multilateral practices.² We suggest that, in an uneven world, multilateral accounts of universality need to be connected with a focus on differentiation—that is, taking into account the particular circumstances of member states relative to those of others when determining responsibilities—in order to strengthen the acceptability of claims about universal applicability. Our assumption is that a greater degree of differentiated universality may translate into more support for multilateralism from all member states, and is thus likely to increase multilateral legitimacy and problem-solving capacity. Applying this logic to UN funding structures, we focus on the Scale of Assessments used for the calculation of member state contributions to the UN regular budget and, with some alterations, also to UN peace operations, the regular budgets of most UN Specialized Agencies, as well as other UN entities and related organizations. By taking the different economic situations and financial capacities of member states into account, the scale provides a gradual approach to determining each state’s rate of assessed contributions. For decades, the scale has been accepted by all UN member states as the underlying formula for calculating membership fees, and it has been remarkably stable over time. Challenges to the effective use of the scale, in turn, stem not only from controversies over its definition and use but also from the substantial expansion of alternative—voluntary—funding streams that have come to dominate large parts of UN budgets, providing richer states with greater ability to wield influence and thus undercut universality ambitions.

The article starts off with discussing universality and differentiation in the context of international organizations with a global membership, notably the UN (section 1). We then turn to UN financing and examine how the Scale of Assessments—a crucial but largely underanalyzed financing modality—resonates with a commitment to differentiated universality in terms of multilateral funding input (section 2). While its current usage is limited and suffers from a range of challenges (section 3), we suggest that the Scale of Assessments has so far been the most stable approximation of—and is an underexploited tool for operationalizing—differentiated universality in a multilateral context defined by substantial differences among member states. We discuss the political context for reform proposals and outline four concrete measures for strengthening and expanding the use of assessed contributions that can contribute to making the UN system a more universally owned set of international organizations (section 4).

The contribution of this article is twofold. On the one hand, the concept of differentiated universality offers a robust theoretical basis for bringing together a practical commitment to universal application with equitable distributions of responsibilities. In other words, it is a framework that can be applied to a variety of empirical contexts, especially relevant in policy efforts to fairly apportion financial obligations for the provision of global public goods. On the other hand, the article offers greater insight into the operation and calculation of the UN Scale of Assessments, which has been underexamined in academic and policy literatures. This is of particular relevance in light of recent efforts—at the World Health Organization (WHO) and elsewhere—to grow member states’ assessed contributions by adapting assessment scales in order to increase the share of revenues coming from predictable, regular sources. Overall, the article highlights that financing reform at the UN is a critical element of wider efforts to reinvigorate and reposition contemporary multilateral institutions, where the quantity of finance can be as important as the form in which it is delivered.

In general terms, universality refers to applicability across time and space.³ In multilateral affairs, references to universality usually denote either the representativeness of all states (in terms of membership, voting rights, or staffing, for instance) or the global relevance of norms, standards, or policies. As a set of formal intergovernmental bodies, the UN system—including not only main organs such as the Secretariat and the General Assembly but also a plethora of Funds, Programmes, Specialized Agencies, and Related Organizations—has often been referred to as the quintessential universal organization, with Article 2 of the UN Charter (1945) enshrining the “principle of sovereign equality among all its members.” Nearly complete global membership and equal voting rights within the General Assembly are practical approximations of a state-focused account of universality.⁴ Since 1945 the UN’s expanding spatial reach—with currently 193 member states—as well as the wide range of issues UN entities and fora deal with have become an integral part of international life. At the UN, arguably more so than in other multilateral settings, explicit universality provisions have played a role across different areas of work. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, has been celebrated as “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations” (UNGA 1948), and the nonproliferation regime on nuclear weapons or negotiations on the fight against climate change have also built on and made use of references to universality (UN 2008; Pauw et al. 2014). The arguably most explicit and strongest commitment to universality in recent UN processes stems from the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals. The link between universality and development is particularly noteworthy as for decades, the mainstream approach to development-related questions at the UN had focused on “underdeveloped,” “developing,” or “Southern” countries only, implicitly assuming that “developed” or “Northern” countries were not facing development-related challenges (Escobar 2011; see Haug, Braveboy-Wagner, and Maihold 2021). Against this backdrop, the 2015 resolution on the 2030 Agenda underlined the “unprecedented scope” of “universal goals and targets which involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike” (UNGA 2015, para. 5).

Overall, the focus on universality in UN settings has thus mostly been directed at questions of or claims about applicability: universal rights, standards, or goals are thought to apply to all countries, everywhere.⁵ Claims about applicability, however, are only one part of the story. While international organizations and their bureaucracies act according to their own rationales (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; see Steffek 2021), fundamentally they are built on intergovernmental spaces and structures that rely on the continued engagement with and/or support of sovereign member states. This means that the implementation of decisions taken in multilateral fora or policies designed by multilateral organizations is far from automatic, as sovereign member states wield substantial power over the extent to which multilateral rhetoric is translated into reality. As a result, UN claims about the universal applicability of norms, standards, or goals often stand in stark contrast to de facto practices. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, carries the notion of universality in its name; but this does not automatically mean the rights it contains are granted and defended by the states party to it. This is because, in an international system built on the assumption of state sovereignty, questions about universal applicability are often closely related to and rely on universal acceptability: if all parties accept and embrace a given framework or agreement, the likelihood of it being applied across all member states increases substantially. While the implementation of widely agreed standards is not necessarily straightforward, universal applicability provisions in multilateral contexts benefit from and rely on the acceptance of and support by member states.⁶

Strong and substantial agreement regarding the universality of goals, standards, or duties, however, is arguably a scarce good in multilateral affairs. This is particularly obvious when it comes to funding questions. A wide range of heated debates in UN fora—from the fight against climate change to the use of development finance—have centered around who pays what, and how much (see Muchhala 2015; Williams and Montes 2016; UNFCC 2022). If an issue is accepted as being of universal applicability and relevance, this does not automatically mean that all member states will agree to contribute, or that all are ready to provide the same level of contribution. Most would probably agree that a state’s specific circumstances, relative to those of others, have to be taken into account when deciding upon and calculating the contributions individual member states are supposed to provide. According to this logic, fairness demands that elements such as per capita income levels or institutional capacity are factored in, and that those responsible for (post)colonial exploitation or the historically largest amount of (per capita or absolute) CO₂ emissions should pay more than those that suffer, have suffered, or are likely to suffer from it (see Pauw et al. 2014; Bracho 2017; Fuhr 2021).

In order to draw the links between applicability and acceptability closer, universality-related debates in multilateral settings are usually accompanied by attempts to include the logic of differentiation.⁷ Differentiation refers to efforts to distinguish between people, things, or, in the case of multilateral cooperation, member states’ often dissimilar situations. States have different levels of capacity and/or responsibility with regard to a given issue, and the (financial) contribution they are expected to provide for addressing it needs to take their particular circumstances into account (Besharati 2013; see Sumner et al. 2020). In multilateral negotiations, differentiated treatment of subgroups of states often furthers agreement. The 2030 Agenda, for instance, recognizes the special needs of least developed countries, small island developing states, landlocked developing countries, middle-income countries, or countries in fragile and conflict situations at multiple occasions. The notion of Common-But-Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) in climate change negotiation, in turn, is another expression of this reasoning. Building on the binary distinction between developed and developing countries, the CBDR principle as operationalized through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) posits that for historic-structural and capacity-related reasons, some states should be required to contribute more than others to multilateral initiatives (Voigt and Ferreira 2016; UNFCCC n.d.; see Colenbrander, Cao, and Pettinotti 2021; Khadka 2021).

Integrating the logic of differentiation into universality discussions highlights questions of inter-state fairness. Agreement on whether a given issue is of universal relevance—that it is thought to apply across space and time and is considered important enough for all member states to be addressed by the multilateral body in question—does not automatically lead to a conclusion on how much each party needs to provide. Universal applicability does not necessarily imply that all member states carry the same burden for addressing universal issues in absolute terms (Long 2015, 215). Rather, differentiation suggests that the particular circumstances of a member state, relative to those of others, are taken into account to determine how much, if at all, it needs to contribute to multilateral endeavours.

At the UN, questions about member state contributions to multilateralism usually centre on the provision of financial resources. When the UN was set up in 1945, the initial membership agreed that the organization’s budget was to be apportioned among all member states, and that all would have a say in determining both the total budget size and the basis of allocation. A formula thus needed to be devised for calculating individual member state contributions. Article 17 of the UN Charter establishes the duty of member states to collectively provide financial support for the organization, while the General Assembly is given competence to assign expenses in a binding fashion across member states (UN 1945, para. 2; see Francioni 2000). One of the first actions of the General Assembly, therefore, was the creation of a Committee on Contributions that, as a technical subcommittee, would prepare the scale according to which obligatory member state payments were to be calculated or assessed (Laurenti 2008). Ever since, this Scale of Assessments has been the fundamental principle underlying the apportionment of member states’ obligatory membership fees intended to cover the UN’s expenses.

For the UN regular budget—supposed to cover “UN core activities” such as expenditures for headquarters personnel, conferences, and UN missions (GPF n.d.)—the methodology for the Scale of Assessments is tabled every three years in the General Assembly. While different components of the scale’s formula have evolved since its first use in 1946 (see figure 1), the basic logic has remained the same, centering around each member state’s share in the global economy—through a focus on national income levels in national currencies, conversion rates, and a base period of multiple years to ensure a more stable calculation—with a per capita income adjustment, a ceiling, and a floor (UN-DESA 2019; UNGA 2021a; see Officer 1996). A maximum assessment rate for least developed countries was introduced in 1983; a debt burden component—factoring in the extent to which low- and middle-income countries have to service external debts—has been a constant element of the formula since 1986;⁸ and since 1995 its low per capita income limit (i.e., the cutoff point for classifying countries as low income for the purpose of the formula) has equaled the world average per capita income. The formula’s contribution floor (i.e., the minimum contribution each member state has to provide, irrespective of circumstances) was originally set at 0.04 percent of the regular budget and then lowered in several steps. Since 1998 the minimum contribution that member states are expected to provide to the organization has stood at 0.001 percent. Since 2001 the formula’s ceiling (i.e., the maximum contribution a member state can be asked to provide) has remained at 22 percent.⁹

This rather abstract methodology behind the Scale of Assessments translates into concrete percentage points for each of the 193 UN member states.¹⁰ Only two countries—the United States (22 percent) and, since 2018, also China (initially slightly more than 12 and since the 2022–24 calculation cycle 15 percent)—currently contribute more than 10 percent of the UN’s regular budget. In 2022 this resulted in USD 693 million for the former and USD 438 million for the latter (UN-S 2022). According to the scale in the 2019–21 calculation cycle, 16 countries contributed between 1 and 10 percent (see figure 2), while 175 member states contributed less than 1 percent. Out of the latter, 30 states were assigned the minimum assessment rate (i.e., the floor) of 0.001 percent of the regular budget, resulting in USD 28,926 each (UNGA 2021b). Although the membership composition of the UN has evolved significantly since the organization’s setup in 1945, the logic behind the distribution of contributions to the UN regular budget has not changed; and for the last twenty years, all fundamental details of the Scale of Assessments formula—notably its focus on per capita income and relief adjustments, as well as minimum/maximum assessment rates—have remained the same.

UN member states also pay assessed contributions beyond the UN regular budget. Overall, we count thirty UN entities in receipt of assessed contributions (see table 1).¹¹ They include central UN bodies—namely, the Secretariat, whose general budget goes far beyond the administrative costs of running key intergovernmental bodies and also includes funding to other UN entities such as the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.¹² Structures related to peace operations at UN headquarters and at country level are also funded through assessed contributions, mostly running through the Department of Peace Operations (DPO). In addition, member states provide assessed contributions to twelve Specialized Agencies, including WHO; eleven Related Organizations, such as UNFCCC; and three Special Entities, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); as well as the UN Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) as two Funds and Programmes.¹³ In 2020 all these entities together received more than USD 136 billion in assessed contributions, amounting to nearly 22 percent of the UN family’s total revenue (UN-CEB n.d., source 2021a).

Across entities and issue areas, the formulas used for calculating assessed contributions differ. The costs for UN peace operations, for instance, have been dealt with separately from the UN regular budget since 1973.¹⁴ For the peace operation budget, the regular budget’s Scale of Assessment formula is applied with some modifications: the share of low-income countries is further reduced while the five permanent members of the UN Security Council compensate for reductions through higher payments, meaning that the shares of the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia are slightly higher than their regular budget shares (Durch 1993; Hüfner 2019, 34–39).

In theory, most entities that receive assessed contributions could come up with their own methodology. UN Specialized Agencies are inter-state bodies with their own legal and financial status, membership, and staff; and most Related Organizations—including the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the International Criminal Court (ICC)—also enjoy an independent status with their own membership and governance arrangements. While some UN entities do in fact rely on other formulas, such as contribution class systems or methodologies that include mandate-related indicators,¹⁵ for most of them the UN regular budget’s Scale of Assessments has been the main reference for calculating obligatory membership fees. As table 1 shows, twenty-three out of thirty entities rely on the UN Scale of Assessments entirely or in part, with most of them modifying the scale only to accommodate differences in membership.¹⁶ In practice, the formula devised and repeatedly confirmed by the General Assembly’s Committee on Contributions has thus provided a model to many UN entities for charging assessed contributions.¹⁷

While there are slight differences in how the formula behind the Scale of Assessments is applied—from the modifications made to the peace operation budgets to the coefficients used by most entities to adapt the scale to their respective memberships—it has been the only long-term funding formula agreed upon by and applicable to all UN member states. With this comprehensive focus on all states as contributors, irrespective of size and wealth, and with its components taking per capita income levels and context-specific challenges into account, the UN Scale of Assessments arguably epitomizes a mechanism that combines concerns for universality with the logic of differentiation. In assessed contributions, claims about universal applicability come close to meeting universal acceptability: all member states provide contributions according to a formula that has, by and large, enjoyed acceptance across the board.¹⁸ Assessed contributions thus approximate—or come close to embodying—the notion of differentiated universality in multilateral funding: all states contribute toward financing international cooperation, with their contributions scaled by a formula that takes basic national differences into account and that builds on the often contentious but overall effective support of all states involved.

While assessed contributions provide the formal backbone for UN financing, they are not the only—and often not the most substantial—form of multilateral funding. In contrast to the obligatory nature of assessed contributions, voluntary resources are extrabudgetary contributions provided to the UN to finance specific operations or services, or to augment budgetary funds allocated for the implementation of institutional operations (see Francioni 2000; Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer 2015; Weinlich et al. 2020). With these contributions being voluntary, member states are free to pay as they choose. While voluntary funding mechanisms were not considered in the UN Charter, they soon became part of the setup of a growing number of UN entities (Graham 2017) and, over the last decades, have expanded significantly (Baumann and Weinlich 2020).

Voluntary funding comes in two forms. Restricted voluntary funding (also referred to as non-core funding) allows contributors to earmark—that is, to specify the thematic, geographic, or other purpose concerning the usage of funds (Weinlich et al. 2020). For unrestricted forms of voluntary funding (also referred to as core funding), contributors do not set constraints. Just like assessed contributions, all unrestricted funds UN entities receive are pooled, and governing bodies retain control over their distribution. Over the years, however, voluntary funds—notably in their earmarked version—have considerably expanded. More than 60 percent of all revenues that entities in the UN system received in 2020 were restricted to prespecified uses (figure 3). Across UN Funds, Programmes, and Specialized Agencies that make up the UN development system, the average share of earmarked funding has been even higher.

Voluntary funding can have positive effects for the UN system, such as supporting collaboration among different UN entities as part of global or country-led funds; strengthening thematic areas that are contested among member states, such as human rights or South-South cooperation;¹⁹ or simply expanding organizations’ resource base (Weinlich et al. 2020). At the same time, voluntary funding often means that multilateral decision-making is circumvented, and individual member states can yield greater influence over what the UN does. Although all members are free to contribute voluntary funding, only a small subset has been doing so more extensively. Recent data shows that in 2020 only fifteen member states—all of them members of the Development Assistance Committee at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development²⁰—together provided 81.4 percent of all voluntary funding to the UN system.²¹ Juxtaposing individual member states’ shares of voluntary and assessed contributions further illustrates underlying patterns: in 2020, for most large Western member states—including the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom²²—individual shares of total voluntary contributions to the UN system were significantly larger than individual shares of total assessed contributions to the UN regular budget. The reverse was true for members of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) grouping, notably China (see Mao 2020), with their individual shares of total voluntary contributions to the UN system ranging well below 1 percent. The bulk of voluntary resources across the UN system thus stems from a small number of wealthy countries, fuelling the perception that the UN is dominated by Western powers.

Against this backdrop, assessed contributions have often played a more marginal role than initially foreseen. In addition to the overall dominance of voluntary funding, the share of obligatory membership fees relative to overall revenues has also differed significantly across the thirty UN entities in receipt of assessed contributions. The UN budget for peace operations stands out in two important ways. First, with an annual size of roughly USD 7 billion over the last ten years, this budget line has a different order of magnitude compared with other UN entities under consideration, sixteen of which reported budgets of less than USD 80 million in 2019 (see figure 4). Second, the share of assessed contributions in the peace operation budget is substantial, particularly when compared with other UN entities that engage in operational activities. As figure 5 shows, organizations with the key task of supporting intergovernmental fora—such as the Preparatory Commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBTO)—have a similarly high share of assessed contributions.

For a considerable number of UN entities, however, assessed contributions amount to a rather limited part of overall revenues. Of the thirty UN bodies in receipt of assessed contributions, seventeen received more than half of their total revenues in 2019 through other means. Among them, six received less than 10 percent from assessed contributions.²³ Voluntary earmarked forms of finance, in turn, represent more than 50 percent of total revenues for eight UN bodies that receive assessed contributions (i.e., UNESCO, ICAO, FAO, ITC, UNIDO, UNEP, UNHABITAT, and UN Women) and more than 80 percent of total revenues for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), UNHCR, and WHO.²⁴ Earmarked contributions also make up a significant portion of the UN’s regular budget, highlighting the extent to which core concerns of the organization currently depend on discretionary and thus less reliable funds.

The expanding clout of voluntary funding has not been the only challenge to the standing of assessed contributions at the UN. Contestations over the definition and use of the Scale of Assessments as well as member states’ payment morale have also left their mark. While the scale’s formula has been relatively stable over time, intergovernmental negotiations about its revisions have been far from straightforward. Although the principle elements of how to calculate a country’s share are widely accepted, member states have repeatedly tried to lock in advantages or push for broader burden sharing, thereby undermining the capacity-to-pay principle (Koschorreck 1998).

One of the largest distortions from a scale built on the relative capacities of member states is arguably the ceiling that, since the setup of the UN, has capped US contributions at a level well below the US share of world income (Laurenti 2008). Over the decades, the US government has used its considerable financial and political clout to lower its percentage (Hüfner 2019, 25–28). Already in the early days of the organization, it rejected a share of nearly 50 percent—that was allotted based on its funding capacity in a world devastated by the Second World War—and negotiated a gradual reduction (Laurenti 2008, 679).²⁵ In 1986 the US Congress, playing a crucial role in authorizing and appropriating US funding, unilaterally put a ceiling of 20 percent on US contributions to the UN, which at that time had stood at 25 percent. The explicit aim of this legislation was to force the UN General Assembly to move to a weighted voting system in accordance with the Scale of Assessments that would have upset the one-country-one-vote principle.

To prevent the provision from taking effect, the General Assembly adopted a new budget process that included inter alia a consensus-based decision-making mechanism (Hüfner 2019). Devised as a compromise to appease the US government, this was a clear departure from the UN Charter, which foresees that decisions about the regular budget are to be made by a two-thirds majority of member states present and voting. Beyond the United States, countries with surging economies or fast-growing oil revenues have also periodically sought to put a brake on paying higher rates of assessments.²⁶ Again, in order to take some of these interests into account, in 1985—despite the opposition of the Committee on Contributions—the General Assembly attached a “scheme of limits” to the assessment formula to restrict the rise or fall of assessments from one assessment period to the next (Laurenti 2008).

More generally, wealthier member states have often been wary about contributing ever larger sums to regular budgets. Initially, obligatory member state funding was introduced and designed based on the assumption that the UN would work mainly as a conference organization, with a secretariat providing administrative support for international meetings. Costs were expected to be modest, which may explain why member states agreed on an obligatory funding model in the first place (Graham 2017, 379). Early on, a majority of member states, mostly developing countries, supported the regular budget to include a small technical assistance program. When demand for this program grew and costs rose, more affluent member states began to object to increases that, in absolute terms, affected them more, and they asked for alternative ways of funding.

The consensus now necessary for most budget-related decisions grants each state a potential veto over the UN’s regular budget. From the perspective of affluent countries, this ensures that developing countries—which make up the majority of UN member states—will not outvote major contributing countries that foot the bill.²⁷ Efforts by large contributors to limit the size of budgets funded through assessed contributions have not only led to stagnating regular budgets across the UN system but are also a key factor behind the expansion of voluntary contribution mechanisms that currently dominate UN funding patterns (Graham 2017, 381–82; see above). Major (Western) contributing states have been coordinating their budgetary interests as the so-called Geneva Group, working toward zero nominal or at least zero real growth of regular budgets across multiple UN organizations (Hüfner 2019). As alluded to above, the simultaneous increase in their voluntary and often restrictively earmarked funding has provided them with greater influence over the thematic agenda of UN entities without the need to engage in time-consuming multilateral negotiations about regular budgets among a divided membership (Gulrajani 2016; Reinsberg 2017).

The politicization of regular budgets can take many forms, from UN bureaucracies drafting budget proposals carefully attuned to political feasibility (Patz and Goetz 2019) to individual member states, such as Russia and the United States, using budget-related decision-making processes to pursue geopolitical agendas.²⁸ One key phenomenon that at first sight might appear rather technical, however, centers around arrears—that is, late payments. While withholding assessed contributions on account of political or other considerations constitutes a breach of the collective duty of member states to contribute to the finances of the organization in accordance with Article 17 of the UN Charter (Francioni 2000), the UN has been at the brink of insolvency several times because certain member states withheld their mandatory payments, paid late, or did not pay the full amount. Again, the United States has played a prominent role, not only because of the considerable size of its share of assessed contributions but also because the US government has often made use of the power of the purse to push for desired outcomes, be it with regard to Israel-Palestine relations, UN reforms, or peace operations (Laurenti 2008; Hüfner 2019). Other countries have also been at odds with Scale of Assessments obligations. As of April 2022 member states collectively owed USD 1. 6 billion to the UN just for its regular budget, with the United States being the largest debtor, followed by China, Argentina, Brazil, and the Russian Federation (UN 2022). For some UN entities, cumulative arrears have been substantial (figure 6). In 2019 they exceeded levels of total 2019 assessed contributions for UNWTO and UNEP; and at UN Women, cumulative arrears exceeded 90 percent of total 2019 assessed contributions.

Arrears can be traced back to member states’ actual difficulties in paying, or to deliberate decisions to withhold contributions due to political considerations. There are several provisions to incentivize early and full payment and discourage arrears. Withholding funds comes at the risk of losing the vote in the General Assembly or respective governing bodies. Article 19 of the UN Charter (UN 1945) stipulates that a member state

In extreme cases, states can also withdraw from paying assessed contributions by leaving the organization, UNESCO being a prominent case in point. The United States has left and reentered UNESCO several times, “constantly us[ing] its funding obligations as a mechanism for influencing UNESCO policy” (Hüfner 2019, 41).²⁹ Most delinquent states, however, usually pay just enough to stay below the threshold for suspension of voting privileges in the General Assembly.³⁰

The effective application of the UN Scale of Assessments is facing substantial challenges. As discussed above, assessed contributions have been marginalized by voluntary—and particularly earmarked—funding through which contributing states yield more direct influence over the UN and its agenda. While a small group of wealthy members effectively decides about the financial survival of a considerable number of UN Funds, Programmes, and Specialized Agencies, the vast majority of UN member states are basically absent from provider lists. While the latter’s situation can lead to a free-rider problem, the former’s position comes with direct and indirect means to dominate multilateral activities. Although most would agree that rich countries in the core of the world economy should provide the bulk of UN funding (see Muchhala 2015), the current state of affairs undermines basic universality provisions applied to the funding input for multilateral cooperation: that all member states contribute, even if their contributions are adjusted to individual circumstances.

Collective decision-making on changes in the Scale of Assessments—as well as on budgets the scale is applied to—is often prone to power politics and shifting payment morale. The increasing marginalization of assessed contributions in the current UN funding system is arguably a by-product of rich member states’ interest in increasing their influence in a context that formally grants all members the same voting rights. Likewise, the politicization of budgetary decision-making is linked to the heterogeneity of UN membership and might further intensify in light of the current geopolitical climate. The ongoing liquidity crises of the UN’s regular budget and financial shortages in different UN entities—further exacerbated by the economic and political turmoil connected to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine—do not augur well for attempts to expand budgets funded through assessed contributions.

At the same time, however, we have shown that the resilience of the Scale of Assessments since the setup of the UN has been substantial. Starting from the assumption that a commitment to differentiated universality can increase the legitimacy and thus problem-solving capacity of the UN, we have argued that—when it comes to multilateral funding structures—the UN Scale of Assessments provides a key approximation of that principle. The scale is more nuanced than rather rigid binary approaches like CBDR, which only distinguish between a developing South and a developed North when delineating responsibilities (Pauw et al. 2014; see Haug, Braveboy-Wagner, and Maihold 2021). It offers a gradual approach that takes the specific and evolving circumstances of individual member states into account, and it is also more inclusive and balanced than current voluntary funding patterns.

Challenges and adjustments notwithstanding, no group of countries has managed to significantly alter the underlying logic of the scale. Despite shortcomings in its design, implementation, and reach, the stability of the formula is a remarkable—and generally undervalued—achievement, and arguably the most concrete sustained application of differentiated universality to funding practices in a multilateral body with global membership. In light of recent—and ongoing—global power shifts, it is particularly remarkable that the Scale of Assessments has accommodated the economic rise of large middle-income countries without major disruptions, even though both absolute and relative increases in their contribution levels have been significant. China is the most prominent case in point. In 2000 the Chinese government paid less than 1 percent of the UN’s regular budget. Since 2018 it has been the second largest contributor after the United States, shouldering just above 12 percent until 2021 and 15 percent for the 2022–24 calculation cycle. Substantial changes in the relations between and relative weight of member states notwithstanding, assessed contributions have been a stable—and arguably undervalued—feature of UN funding practices for more than seven decades.

A reinvigorated focus on the importance and potential of assessed contributions, we suggest, can contribute to increasing the universality credentials of the UN in an uneven world. Overall, and despite obvious odds, there is space for expanding and revising the application of the UN Scale of Assessments. Member states themselves have recognized that the UN’s current funding system is broken and a key factor in preventing the UN from effectively addressing transnational threats. In General Assembly debates on funding and the future of the UN, they have repeatedly discussed increases in assessed contributions and measures to encourage the full and timely payment of dues. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in particular, has asked for a rise in assessed contributions on a number of occasions. In 2017 and 2021, he proposed to make use of mandatory member state fees to finance the UN Resident Coordinator system, the backbone of the UN development system. While he did not succeed in convincing member states, he has continued to advocate for expanding the use of assessed contributions, most recently on prevention and peacebuilding in his 2021 flagship report “Our Common Agenda” (UNGA 2021b, 60). The most recent landmark in funding-related negotiations, however, has been the decision taken by WHO membership in May 2022 to triple the size of the organization’s regular budget over the next six years (Weinlich, Gulrajani, and Haug 2022). This historic move—long considered as highly unlikely by observers—was arguably prompted by member states’ realization that they could no longer starve a body at the center of global technical guidance and coordination in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While member states demand further reforms for implementing their commitments, half of WHO funding should come in the form of assessed contributions by 2028, potentially indicating a turn in how UN member states approach funding matters.

Moreover, and somewhat counterintuitively, growing geopolitical tensions might indeed increase the attractiveness of assessed contributions. Should powerful states that so far have provided only limited amounts of voluntary funds—most notably China—begin to use earmarked funding in a more extensive fashion, the majority of UN membership might come to the conclusion that assessed contributions provide an instrument to contain unilateral influence. Assessed contributions symbolize a commitment to collectively shared responsibility and a belief in multilateral priority setting, also and maybe particularly in times of geopolitical upheaval. While this might not convince the great powers, a stronger commitment to assessed contributions might be increasingly appealing to smaller states—including wealthy ones—that depend on a stable multilateral system to a greater degree.

Grounded in an assessment of current political realities, we identify four concrete proposals aimed at reinvigorating the application and use of assessed contributions across the UN system and thus strengthening and expanding the space for differentiated universality in UN funding structures.³¹ Primarily directed at UN member states, these proposals are not only normatively desirable but also respond to challenges identified above.

First, member states should explore ways to further incentivize the payment of assessed contributions in full and on time. The US government as the largest contributor to the UN regular budget, for instance, has tended to pay a share of its assessed contributions just high enough to ensure that it does not lose its voting rights in the General Assembly. While member states with considerable arrears are in the minority, tightening formal sanctions for those who do not pay their assessed contributions, or do not pay on time, is difficult in light of consensus-based decision-making procedures (see section 3 above). Instead, the paying majority of member states should focus on how to develop incentives and soft—reputational—sanctions so that late or reluctant payers are more likely to act. As a first step, more transparency across the system could be introduced so that system-wide data on arrears is easily accessible. More effective incentive structures for decreasing arrears and increasing the level of on-time payment would not only reinforce the ability of UN bodies to do their work but also, more generally, strengthen the standing of assessed contributions as a stable and reliable multilateral funding mechanism. One incentive-based model already used in a Specialized Agency—that, however, does not receive assessed contributions—is that of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), where voting rights on the governing council are partly determined by member states’ prompt payment in a given year,³² acting as a carrot that incentivizes members’ payment morale with only partial adjustments to the principle of equal universal membership.

Second, member states should try to increase the share of assessed contributions, particularly for those UN entities where (often heavily) earmarked funds have outgrown assessed contributions and other core funds (see figure 5). While several Specialized Agencies and Related Organizations face a funding ratio skewed toward voluntary funding, the WHO is currently the only organization where a sizable increase in obligatory contributions is set to occur. Other UN entities could define the core costs deemed essential for their global governance activities and calculate, as well as communicate, the amount of money each member state would need to pay according to the current Scale of Assessments in order to cover a critical mass of their overall annual budgets. This would allow stakeholders—not only member state representatives but also UN officials, observers, and pressure groups—to get familiar with what this alternative funding practice would look like.³³ This proposal is also in line with a crucial element of the current reform process of the UN development system: through the Funding Compact agreed on between member states and the UN, the former have pledged to increase the overall share of (voluntary) core funding to a level of 30 percent of total funds provided to UN entities (Jenks and Weinlich 2019).³⁴ Discussions about the UN’s global governance functions should include a focus on which functions require which kind of funding. Where assessed contributions may not provide the best revenue stream, other forms of funding—such as replenishments, fees, negotiated pledges, and soft and hard earmarking—might be more appropriate.

Third, member states should explore the possibility of applying the Scale of Assessments to critical parts of the budgets of those UN entities that, so far, do not receive assessed contributions (see figure 7), have a funding ratio skewed toward non-core resources, and play a potentially important role in global governance processes. According to the UN Chief Executives Board for Coordination, there are currently thirteen UN bodies that do not receive assessed contributions: one is a Specialized Agency that has its own replenishment model (IFAD); three are Special Entities (UNRWA, UNAIDS, and UNOPS); four are Funds and Programmes (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WFP); and five are Related Organizations (three training institutions—namely UNITAR, UNSSC, and UNU—as well as the UN Capital Development Fund [UNCDF] associated with UNDP and UNITAID, which is associated with WHO). The four Funds and Programmes, in particular, are heavily reliant on non-core resources and obtain less than 25 percent of their revenues from voluntary core (i.e., unearmarked) sources; at WFP, for instance, the share of earmarked funding stood at 91 percent in 2019.³⁵ For all UN entities that so far have not received assessed contributions,³⁶ voluntary (and in most cases heavily earmarked) forms of finance play a key role in budget compositions. These figures are suggestive of significant income instability and the need for substantial institutional efforts to cover core operational costs. With reference to the UN Scale of Assessments, these entities could, again, calculate and communicate the amount of money each member state would need to pay in order to cover 50 percent of each entity’s overall annual budget, to familiarize stakeholders with what this alternative funding approach would look like and to put current funding practices into perspective.

Finally, member states should discuss how the formula for assessed contributions can be made fit for a world of existential transnational challenges. As outlined above, the basic formula behind contributions to the UN regular budget has remained remarkably stable. In order to ensure that this formula remains fit for purpose, member states should explore the possibility of adding indicators to the Scale of Assessments for specific UN bodies. Here, the premium on peace operation costs provided by the Security Council’s five permanent members serves as a case in point. While a fine balance needs to be struck between mobilizing resources and operationalizing differences in capabilities and responsibilities, issue-specific dimensions can help in updating the regular budget formulas of individual UN entities. For example, should a member state’s climate change vulnerability be factored in, its carbon footprint, or its readiness to host large refugee populations? Such dimensions could also introduce a merit-based element to the question of who absorbs the costs of global governance. Any change to the Scale of Assessments formula is likely to be controversial as it will shift the distribution of costs among member states at a time of extreme geopolitical sensitivity and fiscal constraint. The review of the formula would not be complete without asking whether the cap of 22 percent—the ceiling currently limiting the share of assessed contributions assigned to any given member state—should be significantly lowered to reduce dependencies.

The ways in which the UN and its various entities are currently funded raise important questions with regard to broader universality aspirations. While obligatory contributions calculated via the Scale of Assessments are no silver bullet, they represent a widely accepted mechanism to share the burden for implementing multilaterally agreed standards and goals. Building on a detailed review of the realities of assessed contributions across UN entities, the proposals outlined above—incentivizing the payment of dues; increasing the share of assessed contributions; expanding the application of the Scale of Assessments to entities that so far do not receive assessed contributions; and exploring how the formula for assessed contributions can remain fit for purpose—aim at strengthening the operationalization of the universality principle for the UN system. Overall, we suggest that buttressing differentiated universality in the UN’s funding structures is one step toward translating universality provisions into the practice of global governance. While assessed contributions are affected by member state politics, they provide clearer limits to unilateral influence than voluntary funding. The investment of resources based on a collectively agreed-on formula is more likely to go hand in hand with all member states’ interest in and ownership of multilateral policies and operations made possible through these very investments. While this causal chain is far from straightforward, expanding the application of the Scale of Assessments across UN entities and budgets can contribute to turning the UN system into a more universally owned set of organizations, strengthening its legitimacy and ultimately allowing it to improve its capacity and effectiveness. “Getting the funding right” is a crucial step and an important lever, also for increasing the universality of other aspects across the UN system, such as the staffing of international bureaucracies, its formal and informal decision-making, and the design of organizational policies. All this can have significant effects on perceptions of whether the UN is a relic of an international order dominated by a few wealthy countries, or a global governance actor that may help steer the world through upcoming crises with a more inclusive and global outlook.

We would like to thank J. P. Singh and Michael Woolcock for guidance during the drafting process; three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on earlier versions of this article; Jonas Vellguth for his excellent research assistance; and Caroline Wesson for administrative support. We are also grateful to Max-Otto Baumann, Klaus Hüfner, Ronny Patz, Bernhard Reinsberg, and other contributors to this special issue project for exchanges and feedback that have helped to improve the quality of the article. Sebastian Haug and Silke Weinlich acknowledge financial support from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); Nilima Gulrajani acknowledges funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Sebastian Haug is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where his portfolio covers multilateral politics, development partnerships, and global power shifts. Haug used to work for the United Nations in China and Mexico and regularly advises (inter)governmental bodies on South-South and triangular cooperation. He is the lead editor of “The ‘Global South’ in the study of world politics” (Third World Quarterly) and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Nilima Gulrajani is a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and visiting fellow at King’s College Department of International Development. She has spent fifteen years researching bilateral aid governance and reform and the geopolitics of global development architecture. Gulrajani came to ODI from the London School of Economics, where she was assistant professor in the Government Department and the Department of International Development. Silke Weinlich is a senior researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where she leads a research and policy advice project on the United Nations development system and its reform needs. She has worked extensively on multilateral development finance, including on earmarked funding, and has followed United Nations reform processes in fields ranging from peacekeeping to sustainable development and global governance questions more broadly. Weinlich holds a doctorate from the University of Bremen.