A Country-Led Cooperation Approach to Development | The Futures Summit

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is a UN entity that specializes in infrastructure, procurement, and project management services, supporting governments, UN agencies, and development partners in implementing projects across complex and high-risk environments. Unlike many UN entities that focus on policy or normative frameworks, UNOPS operates as a delivery-focused platform, managing billions of dollars in projects annually across sectors including climate resilience, energy, health, and infrastructure. Its model emphasizes efficiency, transparency, and operational flexibility, positioning it as a key implementing partner in contexts where traditional development delivery mechanisms may be too slow or fragmented. 

Under Executive Director Jorge Moreira da Silva, UNOPS has positioned itself at the center of broader UN reform efforts, including the UN80 agenda, that seek to make sustainable development cooperation more efficient, accountable, and results-driven in an increasingly constrained fiscal environment. At the center of this shift is a move away from measuring success by financial inputs or project outputs and toward measuring it by tangible impact on the ground. This reflects a growing recognition across the UN system that the challenge is not simply about mobilizing more financing, but about ensuring that existing resources are better aligned with actual country needs. With a $4 trillion global funding gap for the Sustainable Development Goals, financing often fails to reach the most fragile and underserved contexts. Through its demand-driven model in which governments define their own priorities and contract UNOPS for implementation, UNOPS is helping advance a more country-led approach to development, one that aims to strengthen both the quality of delivery and the real-world effectiveness of development spending. This discussion draws on UNOPS's experience to explore what more effective, country-led development cooperation can look like in practice, and how the broader development system can close the gap between available resources and real-world needs.  

The CSIS Futures Summit is made possible through generous support from Chevron Inc. (Founding sponsor), ADM, Cisco, and the Embassy of Denmark in Washington D.C.