Preparing for the United Nations Security Council: Canadian approaches to policy development

Canadian policy development: Policy innovations for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

As Canada pursued a seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2020, a parallel effort behind the scenes at Global Affairs Canada (GAC)’s headquarters in Ottawa sought to prepare the Government of Canada to serve effectively on the Council and to advance Canadian priorities over a two-year Council term. Although planning began at a relatively advanced stage of the campaign, and no standalone resources had yet been allocated towards the potential term itself (as opposed to the campaign), a preparatory team across several branches of GAC HQ and at key Canadian diplomatic missions abroad worked to ensure Canada was ready to effectively serve as an elected member after a twenty-year absence from the Council.

In this commentary, we share insights concerning how GAC approached policy design in preparation for a potential term on the UNSC. We also share how these policy preparations were adjusted to contend with COVID-19 restrictions. In advance of the vote, media attention in Canada was predominately critical of Canada’s bid for a seat, with limited attention in the press to the advantages of being elected to a non-permanent seat on the Council. Hence, this policy brief aims to demonstrate the preparatory work that took place to advance Canadian foreign policy interests while on the Council, with the second order goal of clarifying the purposes and aims a country might have for pursuing a seat on the UNSC.

The brief covers work undertaken by a small team in GAC in preparing policy for a potential Canadian Council seat, while also highlighting some of the challenges faced, lessons learned, and key takeaways drawn from the experience of preparing for a potential term: issues which are likely to be encountered by policymakers in any country aiming to serve on the UNSC. It also explores the timing, sequencing, and innovative policymaking efforts that were undertaken against a short timeline and in a high-pressure environment. It highlights entry points for civil society and academic stakeholders who wish to better understand and potentially influence the policymaking process in future engagements of Canada on the highest-level multilateral bodies.

Preparatory approaches undertaken by Canada included the advance preparation of standing position papers covering more than sixty-four policy issues on the Council’s agenda, as well as the refinement of key Canadian foreign policy priorities, developing campaign themes into more fully-articulated, Council-specific potential “signature initiatives,” and early, targeted engagement with UNSC subject matter specialists within the academic community and civil society. These approaches were among other efforts to mainstream cross-cutting policy priorities across a wide swath of thematic and geographic issue areas.

Preparations for Canada’s Council term were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many GAC staff working remotely for the final three months before the Council vote and Canada’s Permanent Mission to the UN focused on emergency management due to New York City’s status as the global epicentre of the virus in spring 2020. This experience reinforced the importance of prospective members starting as early as possible with preparations for any potential Council term.

Background

While there has been much discussion of reforming the UNSC, ¹ campaign dynamics, ² and the influence of small states on the Council, ³ there has been little comment about the development and preparation of policy positions on UNSC agenda items. Countries vying for a UNSC seat often release their campaign platforms ahead of elections to the Council. However, these position statements are typically quite general, and there is little discussion in the literature of the more comprehensive preparations states must undertake behind the scenes to be prepared to serve.

For example, some authors have assessed the degree to which countries’ bids for seats on the UNSC are situated within their broader foreign policy strategies and geopolitical contexts, but little has been explored on the practicalities of policy development for a UNSC bid. ⁴ To address this gap and provide an inside perspective on the issue, this commentary is written in the spirit of open government, which aims to make high-level decision-making accessible and transparent, leading to greater public trust in government. ⁵

As a potential non-permanent member of the UNSC for the 2021–2022 term, Canada sought to bring its voice to one of the world’s most important decision-making bodies. Yet compared with Canada’s necessarily limited engagement with UNSC business as a non-permanent member over the past twenty years, and the corresponding low level of dedicated resources (both human and financial), this opportunity would have also entailed new responsibilities driven by the Council’s agenda, including a high volume of consequential policy and legal decisions, negotiations on UNSC resolutions, communications to the Canadian and international public, and the application of a UNSC lens across all of Canada’s multilateral interactions.

This new burden of work facing the Canadian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, as well as many other missions across Canada’s global network—not to mention a wide range of Ottawa-based stakeholders—would have represented a significant increase in the pace and volume of decision-making, all under considerable media and public scrutiny. Further, much had changed quantitatively and qualitatively in Council business and dynamics during the twenty-year interval between Canada’s last term on the Council and the 2021–2022 period, necessitating a fresh approach while undertaking the two-year term as an elected member.

Position papers and cross-cutting priorities

Canada would have been expected to speak on all issues at the Security Council. Prior to the beginning of a term, comprehensive policy development exercises were required to ensure that Canada’s delegates would have adequately clear guidance on Canadian positions on every issue, in the form of an expansive suite of position papers. These papers would have been the main source of standing policy guidance to be used by Canadian officials in drafting instructions and statements, thus easing the day-to-day pressure on geographic branches and other policy divisions to respond on short timelines to complex policy questions in New York. While Canadian foreign policy has long contended with all of the issues on the UNSC agenda from its national perspective, these foreign policy positions may not have specifically engaged with the UNSC-specific angles of all issues in some time, given the twenty-year period since Canada last served on the Council. The position papers thus represented the additional policy articulation required to prepare Canada with adequately nuanced arguments and positions on all issues, and with adequate time to ensure cross-cutting support from all stakeholders and senior officials.

The position papers developed by GAC were to respond to the need to articulate Canada’s existing policies on international issues (e.g., DPRK non-proliferation, use of chemical weapons in Syria) to respond to the particular elements and dimensions that can arise in UNSC decision-making specifically. This process was to be driven by the branch responsible for each of the respective UNSC agenda items (e.g., Africa Branch, the Multilateral Branch, etc.). This would have ensured a sufficient depth of policy guidance backed by a broad consensus within the department on key issues, and would have provided the basis upon which the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations in New York, and headquarters officials drafting instructions for it, would have drawn when defining Canada’s positions in response to UNSC business.

Although a major effort, GAC undertook a process to develop position papers for all real and anticipated UNSC agenda items, according to a template that provides initial standing policy guidance, and parameters to triage issues for senior management. UNSC position papers considered highly specific issues as they appear on the UNSC agenda and focused predominantly on the UNSC’s past treatment of them. In this sense, the UNSC position papers differed significantly from GAC’s traditional bilateral or thematic briefs which address higher-level country contexts and primarily bilateral or thematic dynamics, rather than the specific items that are of interest to the UNSC and multilateral elements in particular. By striving to develop position papers in advance, Canada allowed itself more time to ensure a strong consensus position was in place before the term, should the government secure a seat on the Security Council. To be sure, the papers were not meant to replace ongoing oversight by senior officials, but rather to give Canada’s Permanent Mission to the UN and GAC HQ officials supporting the UNSC effort the guidance with which to work from initially, thereby increasing speed and responsiveness in the fast-moving UNSC environment.

Practical considerations

The position paper draftees were instructed to focus on the UNSC, detailing how the UNSC had treated the specific agenda item in question, along with Council dynamics and relevant resolutions on the topic in question. The first step of this process was to construct the list of anticipated agenda items with corresponding lead and consultee divisions across GAC. The UNSC prep team worked with Canada’s Permanent Mission to the UN to develop a guidance note and template to be used by lead divisions to improve the uniformity and practicality of the emerging guidance.

The preparatory team also found that the GAC departmental library was an effective partner in thinking through how to set up and conduct research. Librarians created tailored resource lists to share with position paper pilot leads, including background information corresponding to each agenda item in the form of previous open debate transcripts, UNSC resolutions, and other key documents.

Achieving appropriate detail on cross-cutting policy priorities

The UNSC preparatory team was counselled by veterans of past UNSC terms to be “ruthless” about pushing for Canada’s policy priorities across the UNSC regular agenda, not only through signature initiatives (i.e., in seizing opportunities within regular agenda items, which account for 95 percent of UNSC business). In this vein, Canada identified key cross-cutting issues meriting increased Council attention, and put in place approaches to indefatigably push to ensure adequate discussion of these elements each time there was an opportunity to do so, whether in formal UNSC meetings, informal likeminded discussions, Arria formula meetings, or other settings. Efforts were made to include elements of these cross-cutting policy priorities in position papers, but it was at times challenging to ensure adequate detail on these issues in all position papers where policy links might be more tenuous.

For example, a geographic desk-officer writing the position paper for South Sudan cannot be expected to know all aspects of the specific cutting-edge implications for climate security, while the climate security division designated for consultation on this may not be an expert on the ramifications in South Sudan. A solution for this was to ensure that signature initiative leads were engaged and providing input into positions papers where possible, ensuring cohesion between individual Canadian positions and the broader policy priorities for the term. One successful approach was to ensure that signature initiatives were drafted before the position paper drafting process began in earnest, so that policy divisions drafting position papers had the benefit of the signature initiatives’ deep explorations of past UNSC treatment of their issues, in advance of their own drafting of the many position papers.

Take, for example, one position paper considering climate security in South Sudan:

Consultee divisions

The preparatory team also sought to ensure policy coherence: that standing Canadian policy guidance on cross-cutting issues (e.g., human rights, gender equality) would be included in all position papers. To this effect, a list of divisions with cross-cutting policy responsibility, who should be consulted on all position paper drafts, was also developed. This effort was important to ensure that the “right hand” knows what the “left hand” is doing and that Canadian policy would have been coherent across various overlapping issue areas. These divisions were advised of their responsibility in this regard early in the process. For example, GAC’s division responsible for advancing Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) would be consulted on the WPS implications of each position paper to ensure policy consistency and coherence on all position papers.

Consultee divisions were expected to feed into position papers in several ways, including potentially delivering workshops to position paper leads, sharing key “off the shelf” policy advice in advance. Ideally the process would have resulted in: 1) capacity development; 2) reasonably detailed drafts by leads on these specific kinds of Canadian priorities for their agenda items; 3) a lighter burden of effort when ultimately revising by permanent consultee divisions for these priorities; and 4) a permanent improvement in the consideration of these transversal themes when geographical specialists consider advice for regions going forward, for policy both inside and outside of the UNSC.

Policy-related actions and innovations

Canada’s preparations for a potential term on the United Nations Security Council benefitted from some key steps which helped contend with the enormity of the preparatory task while facing considerable time pressure and complex resource, organizational, and policy challenges:

• Solicitation of targeted meetings with key academics and civil society groups, not only on the overarching policy issues but also when it came to more niche sub-issues allowed for credible, established voices to be heard and reflected in the preparations.

Conclusion

Although Canada was not elected to serve in 2021–2022, we argue that the preparatory efforts of GAC and across the Government of Canada made a contribution of enduring value to the department and to Canada’s role in the multilateral system.

Though Canada will not have the ability to advocate in the context of the UNSC itself, policymakers now have at their disposal a wide array of considered policy positions on the world’s most pressing security issues. These will inform Canadian engagement in other multilateral fora, as well as in Canada’s ongoing engagement with the UNSC and UN General Assembly members, as well as in developing Canada’s response to new developments in these areas.

In addition, mainstreaming crosscutting policy priorities is a common challenge for policymakers, and often requires innovative solutions to overcome bureaucratic and political blockades. For example, integrating cross-cutting considerations such as gender and climate into policy, and combining elements of vertical and horizontal organizational arrangements, have been found to be beneficial. ⁷ Proactive efforts to harness the often siloed organizational structures and capacities at GAC in this case were critical in preparing for a potential term on the UNSC.

Many of the themes that were explored with a Council lens will continue to guide Canada’s multilateral engagement. Key elements of UNSC preparations that are playing a role in the future include working to make the UN more effective across silos, leadership of other UN bodies like the Peacebuilding Commission, integrating a feminist approach throughout all initiatives, actively prioritizing non-traditional partners for engagement in multilateral settings, and further exploring the linkages between climate and economic factors on international peace and security.

After the extensive policy development work and specialized training undertaken for the preparatory process, GAC’s capacity to advance Canadian interests and influence decision-making across the UN system has been enhanced. The work undertaken continues to support Canadian efforts to advocate on foreign policy priorities in the UN system including on key questions of peace and stability. As Canadians reflect upon the agenda of renewed multilateral engagement going forward, these efforts will be important contributions to the conversation; this brief has thereby provided perspectives and advice on how academics, civil society organizations, and citizens can interact with the policymaking process that guides Canada’s actions on the global stage.