In Hindsight: Better Negotiations for Clearer Mandates
Mandating and overseeing peace operations, whether multidimensional peacekeeping operations with a military component or smaller political field missions, consume the largest proportion of the Council’s time and energy.
The 2015 reports by the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the Secretary-General put forward sets of recommendations for reforming how operations are carried out. This peace operations review requires action by the Secretariat, the Council and the General Assembly. Some of the most challenging issues raised in these reports relate to the strategic alignment among the Council, the Secretariat and the troop- and police- contributing countries, which is heavily influenced by some of the Council’s working methods that frame (and limit) the authorisation, design and oversight of peace operations.
The Council has already taken on board some recommendations, but much remains to be done to improve comprehensively how peace operations are mandated. One of the issues that require further discussion and reflection among Council members is the negative impact of negotiating patterns in the drafting and the design of mandates. Already in 2000 the Brahimi report, concerned about the ambiguity that could result from compromises required to build consensus in the Council and the disparity between mandates and resources, argued for “clear, credible and achievable mandates”. Even though the Secretariat may sometimes be responsible for providing unrealistic recommendations, the Council’s own practices in negotiating resolutions that establish or renew peace operations contribute to the lack of focus in mandates and the gap between mandates and their implementation.
Language becomes an end in itself. The HIPPO report noted that “too often, mandates and missions are produced on the basis of templates instead of tailored to support situation-specific political strategies”. The lack of strategic focus is exacerbated by the tendency of Council members to seek the inclusion of favoured issues, sometimes irrespective of their relevance or priority in the context of the situation under discussion. These so-called “Christmas tree” mandates also reflect advocacy efforts by Secretariat departments and NGOs, which also sometimes focus on language as an objective in itself without considering its urgency or achievability. The HIPPO report said that the Secretariat and the UN system should present the Secretary-General’s recommendations without recourse to lobbying Council members for specific interests. Council members are often unable to assess whether particular language in a resolution makes a significant difference in the implementation of the mandate.
Personnel numbers drive Council discussions. As a result of the 2009 New Horizon reform initiative, the Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support committed to developing a capability-driven approach to mandates, moving away from a “number-intensive” strategy to one that focuses on the results and impact of peace missions—and therefore on the necessary skills, capacity and willingness—rather than simply on generating adequate numbers of troops, police and equipment. However, the Council has done little to embrace this approach, and troop and police numbers continue to drive Council discussions about mandates. At the same time, the numbers of civilian personnel dominate budgetary negotiations in the Fifth Committee. Sequencing, prioritisation and flexibility, as recommended by HIPPO and the Secretary-General, require the Council to emphasise its strategic objectives and to promote a new approach to budgetary discussions. In this context, the timid attempts to prioritise or sequence mandates at the Council level are rarely reflected in Fifth Committee discussions.
Irrespective of developments on the ground, most mandates are reviewed only at the end of their cycle, a fixed period (often a year) after the mandate is established. The conditions on the ground might change (for example, an increase in asymmetric attacks, a change in the nature of threats to civilians or the unravelling of the political process), but Council members are often reluctant to reassess the appropriateness of mandates in light of bad news, in the hope that tactical changes within the existing mandates can mitigate the new threats. Sometimes, however, the deterioration of a particular situation makes changing existing mandates unavoidable, as in South Sudan in December 2013.
Council members are usually not involved in strategic discussions about the overall direction of the operations before negotiating the renewal of their mandates. One could argue that mandate cycles provide a tentative timeframe that can be used to forge a common strategic approach among Council members ahead of these renewals, but such exercises are very uncommon. Council members, particularly the elected ones, are sometimes discouraged by the penholder arrangement from taking the initiative on country situations on which they “do not hold the pen”.
Most discussions among all 15 members regarding mandate renewals happen only after a first-draft resolution has been circulated by the penholder to the full Council, more often than not about a week before the needed adoption. Council members—usually represented by relatively junior diplomats—meet in person a few times, but the greater part of negotiations takes place through emails or in bilateral discussions between the penholder and Council members who have raised concerns. The time pressure generated by the pattern of late circulation to all Council members also increases the barriers to significant reflection and changes. This process effectively precludes the collective development of strategic thinking.
Even though some Council members have started convening informal meetings with troop- and police-contributing countries ahead of mandate renewals, these still depend on the goodwill of the organisers rather than a systematic effort by the Council as a whole to engage early in the negotiation process with all relevant stakeholders. Also, troop- and police-contributing countries continue to request that more information is made available to them ahead of mandate renewals.
A 25 November 2015 presidential statement noted that the Secretary-General’s report identified a number of areas where the Council could play a key role in strengthening UN peace operations and expressed its general intention to continue to consider the relevant recommendations. Although it encouraged the Secretary-General to take forward those steps under his authority to contribute to improving UN peace operations and to provide the Council with updates on progress, the statement did not indicate how the Council itself would further consider the recommendations regarding its own responsibilities for peace operations. Council members could address some of the trends identified above by modifying the way business is conducted in the Council: flexibly tweaking peace operations mandates as conditions on the ground change, allowing for more time to negotiate resolutions, thinking about the objectives to attain before negotiating the numbers of uniformed personnel needed to reach them and prioritising mandates so they are achievable and not a Turtle Bay-centred wish list. By focusing more on these incremental changes and with the objective of delivery on the ground, rather than making use of general exhortations or negotiating more formal outcomes, the Council could significantly improve the way it designs and oversees peace operations.
For further analysis, see Security Council Report’s May 2016 research report, The Security Council and UN Peace Operations: Reform and Deliver. This report addresses what the peace operations review requires of the Council.
