As more than 13,000 delegates gather in New York this week for the United Nations’ annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), one structural question sits beneath the formal agenda: how will the UN system itself function in its pursuit of gender equality in the years ahead?
This year, that question centres on the UN80 Initiative – the Secretary-General’s system-wide reform process – and a review of whether UN Women and UNFPA should be merged into a single entity.
It’s important to be clear. What is underway is an assessment, not a decision. But once something enters a formal reform pathway, it stops being hypothetical.
At first glance, this may sound like bureaucratic housekeeping. A merger could mean reduced duplication, streamlined country presence and administrative efficiency. In a time of tightening budgets and rising donor-directed funding, that language is attractive.
But for feminists, this is not just an organisational question. It is a question of power.
Why institutional design matters
Institutions like the UN are not neutral vessels. They are political architecture. They shape who sets the agenda, who holds power to account, whose expertise is valued, and whose rights are protected when political winds shift. When we discuss merging UN Women and UNFPA, we are not rearranging office furniture. We are debating the future of global women’s rights infrastructure.
UN Women was created to do something deliberately disruptive: to hold the entire UN system accountable for gender equality. Its mandate extends beyond programs. It carries system-wide coordination and normative leadership, ensuring gender equality is not treated as an afterthought but as a binding obligation.
UNFPA, meanwhile, leads on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), population data and demographic analysis, humanitarian gender-based violence coordination and reproductive health supply chains that reach women in the most fragile settings. Its work is technical, operational and often lifesaving.
These are not interchangeable functions. They are specialised mandates built over decades. They also operate at different scales: UNFPA primarily delivers large national programs and humanitarian services, while UN Women’s work is more catalytic, focused on policy change, institutional accountability and system-wide coordination.
The real issue isn’t duplication
The uncomfortable truth is this: the greatest threat to global gender equality architecture is not duplication. It is chronic underinvestment.
Core, flexible funding has declined, while earmarked, donor-directed funding has come with hard limitations on both agencies. Across much of the UN system, non-core funding now accounts for a substantial share – and in some cases the majority – of agency budgets, limiting institutional autonomy and narrowing strategic flexibility. In many countries, gender ministries have been closed, budgets reduced and support for women’s rights organisations scaled back.
Within the UN itself, specialist gender expertise has in some cases been downgraded or absorbed into broader portfolios. These are political choices, not neutral administrative adjustments.
In that context, consolidation risks addressing symptoms while leaving the underlying problem untouched. If governments are unwilling to adequately finance gender equality and SRHR mandates, merging institutions will not solve that deficit. It may simply redistribute scarcity within a new organisational form.
Where feminist analysis fits
And yet one of the striking features of the UN80 reform architecture is how limited explicit gender equality expertise appears to sit at its centre. Structural reform is being steered primarily through administrative and fiscal lenses. When the mandates under review concern women’s rights and bodily autonomy, that imbalance matters.
Feminist civil society groups have already scrutinised the merger idea, arguing it would dilute distinct mandates, weaken specialist capacity for SRHR, and dismantle infrastructure built over decades. Their analysis highlights that only a minority of UN Women and UNFPA’s work overlaps – a point also reflected in the UN’s own baseline assessment, which notes limited duplication and significant complementarity between the two entities.
We have seen versions of this story before. When Australia absorbed AusAID into DFAT, development expertise was folded into foreign policy priorities. When the United Kingdom merged DFID into the Foreign Office to create the FCDO, gender equality commitments survived on paper but lost institutional autonomy amid budget contraction. In both cases, specialised mandates were drawn into larger machinery where strategic interests and fiscal pressures inevitably reshaped priorities.
Not all mergers weaken mandates. UN Women itself was created through consolidation, and it strengthened visibility for gender equality precisely because it elevated the mandate and secured high-level political backing. The lesson is not that merger is inherently harmful. It is that redesign only strengthens rights architecture when it comes with elevation, protection and resources.
The stakes for women and girls
Institutional reform is rarely neutral. Transition periods disrupt programs. Funding uncertainty affects service delivery. In fragile settings, even short-term instability can affect access to reproductive health care and coordination of gender-based violence services.
An intersectional lens makes this clear: institutional experimentation is not experienced evenly. Those already marginalised carry disproportionate risk.
As CSW approaches, we risk becoming absorbed in questions of structure – committees, reviews, consolidation pathways – while the women whose lives depend on these systems are asking simpler questions:
Will my clinic stay open?
Will there be support if I experience violence?
Will international norms still defend my rights when national protections weaken?
Why this matters to Australia
This debate is not distant diplomacy. Australia is a longstanding donor and engaged member across these institutions. As discussions progress, Australia’s voice will influence how gender equality and SRHR mandates are safeguarded and strengthened within the UN system.
For a country that has consistently stated its commitment to gender equality in foreign policy and development assistance, this moment matters.
What happens next
A merger could, if deliberately designed and properly resourced, create a stronger combined entity. It could integrate gender equality and SRHR more cohesively and reduce administrative burden. But without explicit safeguards, sustained financing and feminist leadership at the centre of reform, there is equal risk that consolidation will dilute what it claims to strengthen.
Reform may well be necessary. But reform without feminist analysis risks weakening the very architecture it seeks to improve. And if, instead, coordination is strengthened without structural consolidation, the deeper question remains: will Member States confront the chronic underinvestment that has hollowed out women’s rights architecture in the first place?
There may be no simple answer yet. But one truth endures. When institutional reform sidelines feminist analysis, it is not institutions that suffer. It is always women and girls.