The Secretary-General’s last HLPF
António Guterres sat through the entire event, answering after each panel rather than delivering remarks and leaving. His second term ends on 31 December 2026, and he said plainly that he intends to return to civil society afterwards. That lent the session an unusual candour, because the reform he was defending, the UN80 Initiative, will mostly be executed by someone else.
His framing of the reform was that the UN’s three pillars cannot be separated, a proposition he has spent a decade arguing against member states who would prefer the organisation stick to peace and security.
From participation to partnership
The phrase the room kept returning to was the Secretary-General’s own, and it concedes the criticism it answers: that consultation with civil society has been a ritual with no consequence for decisions.
He was then unusually direct about why that is hard, in a sentence that a Secretary-General is not obliged to say out loud.
Civil-society speakers pressed for something more concrete than a slogan, repeatedly citing the governing board of UNAIDS, where civil-society representatives have sat with the same standing as member states since 1995, as proof that the UN system can do this when it chooses to.
Others noted that the practical barriers are getting worse rather than better: shrinking budgets, visa refusals, and delegates who censor themselves because they have to go home afterwards. One panellist asked whether the Commission on the Status of Women should move out of New York entirely, on the grounds that a conversation missing half its participants is not the conversation it claims to be.
Measuring what did not happen
The sharpest contribution for a project about counting came from Nudhara Yusuf, who co-chairs the Coalition for the UN We Need. Her argument was that the UN measures its success in outputs it can count, and that this systematically undervalues the work that prevents crises from occurring.
It is the measurement problem in its hardest form. A resolution adopted is a number. A war averted is a counterfactual, and no indicator framework yet built can see one. Another speaker made the same move toward lived outcomes, asking whether success should be counted in protocols adopted or in whether women can walk safely at night and exercise bodily autonomy.
The sharpest critique
The event did not resolve into consensus, and the strongest dissent came from Emilia Reyes of the Mexican organisation Equidad de Género, who rejected the premise that a seat at the table is what civil society should be asking for.
Others argued that UN80, arriving as an efficiency and austerity exercise, risks shrinking civic space under the banner of reform, and called for a non-regression principle and human-rights assessments built into it. Anselmo Lee proposed widening the founding phrase itself, from “we the peoples” to include nature and future generations, in line with the Pact for the Future. The Secretary-General’s own answer to the structural question was decentralisation of power: to civil society, to local and regional government, and through reform of the Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions, which he said represent the world of 1945 rather than the world of today.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This maps to SDG 16 (inclusive institutions) and SDG 17 (partnerships and means of implementation), and it sits directly upstream of everything else this Forum reviewed. Guterres cited the same headline the week has revolved around, that 36% of targets are on track or making moderate progress while 15% have gone into reverse. The architecture question, as Yusuf framed it, is that the SDGs are what has to be delivered, the Pact for the Future is what multilateralism must become to deliver them, and UN80 is what the UN itself must become inside that system. Whether “we the peoples” ends up meaning structural power or remains a preamble is the test the reform has set itself.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the special event (9 July 2026).
- UN80 Initiative, the reform under discussion. Our briefs.
- Pact for the Future, and the Global Digital Compact. Our brief.
- Coalition for the UN We Need · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. The Secretary-General’s name and the panellists named above were reconciled against public records; the transcript garbled most participants’ names beyond reliable reconstruction, so the remainder are cited by role or region. Several figures asserted from the floor could not be substantiated and have been omitted.