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Leveraging collective knowledge | 06/03/2025

Keeping up with the United Nations – an interview with Helena Fraser and Carmen Arguello

Over the past several years, PAGE has forged strong collaborations with UN Resident Coordinator Offices and UN Country Teams to provide economic expertise and policy guidance on green economy principles. This initiative enhances global understanding and leverages the UN system for green economic transformation. The interview series titled “Keeping Up with the United Nations” aims to illuminate these fruitful partnerships at both the country and global levels.

This month, PAGE features an insightful interview with Helena Fraser and Carmen Arguello from the United Nations Development Coordination Office (UNDCO).

Ms. Helena Fraser oversees policy and programme advice and support to the UN Resident Coordinator system and UN Country Teams in support of the 2030 Agenda. With 28 years of experience within the UN, she served as the UN Resident Coordinator in Uzbekistan from 2017 to 2021. Earlier in her career, Helena Fraser worked with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jordan, Georgia, and at headquarters.

Ms. Carmen Arguello serves as a Sustainable Development Officer for the UN Resident Coordinator System at the UNDCO, where she leads the SDG Financing and Economic Transformation Portfolio. With over 14 years of experience in financing for development, Carmen possesses substantial expertise in structuring financial instruments, convening coordination mechanisms, and supporting capacity development.

In this interview, Helena and Carmen discuss the role of the UNDCO, its engagement with PAGE, key milestones in their collaboration, and the future of the DCO-PAGE partnership.

What is the UN Development Coordination Office and its role ?

Helena Fraser:

Created as a result of the reforms of the UN development system, the Development Coordination Office (DCO) manages and oversees the Resident Coordinator system, the driving force behind a unified and effective UN approach to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). DCO empowers Resident Coordinators – leading UN country teams across 162 countries and territories – with the tools and resources they need to deliver in support of national efforts for sustainable development. 

DCO also serves as the secretariat for the UN Sustainable Development Group, a collaborative body of 34 UN agencies, funds, and programmes working together to advance the 2030 Agenda. DCO facilitates joint policy formation and decision-making, encourages programmatic cooperation, supports efforts for management efficiencies, and offers overall strategic guidance.

DCO is also the engine for the implementation of the reform of the UN development system, ensuring an effective, efficient, and accountable response to the needs and priorities of countries and their people.

Why is engaging with RCO Economists essential?

Carmen Arguello:

Thanks to the reform of the UN system, we now have an independent office to coordinate the work of the United Nations Development System. Resident Coordinators Offices now have a dedicated economist at the country level that enables us to pull together system-wise expertise on multidimensional topics such as economic transformation.

Furthermore, by updating our country level programming documents (the Common Country Analysis which feeds into UN Cooperation Frameworks), we now have concrete entry points for the UN system to support country level efforts in transforming economic models on the ground while including the voices of a wide range of national stakeholders.

The RCO Economist has a key role to play in this regard.

National contexts are diverse, and UN support is mindful of idiosyncratic challenges and development trajectories, which are subject to a great extent of uncertainty. Precisely in this highly uncertain context, we are at a critical point to make progress on the SDGs, increasing information on how potential trajectories of interdependent and connected key economic and environmental variables can nurture a more informed public discourse on desired outcomes of current economic decisions.

In this context, the PAGE-DCO support to the RC system, and particularly to strengthening the skills of RCO Economists, plays a pivotal role in harnessing the UN Development System expertise to support key stakeholders working on economic policy and national planning to enable a green and fair economic transformation.

PAGE has become a close-knit community and the collaboration with DCO has enabled RCOs to benefit from the expertise of PAGE entities but also from the rich exchanges among peer economists. [...]

Helena Fraser
Helena Fraser
Director, Policy and Programming, UNDCO

The PAGE-DCO support to the RC system, and particularly to strengthening the skills of RCO Economists, plays a pivotal role in harnessing the UN Development System expertise to support key stakeholders working on economic policy and national planning to enable a green and fair economic transformation.

Carmen Arguello
Carmen Arguello
Sustainable Development Officer, UNDCO

What are the key milestones in the PAGE-DCO collaboration?

Helena Fraser:

The Sustainable Development Goals are deeply intertwined – any action taken to achieve one can advance some others. Acknowledging that halfway to 2030, only 17% of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are on track, the international community needs to pivot to an integrated policy approach to achieve the SDGs – one that navigates the synergies and trade-offs in taking a certain line of action.

A condition to unleash SDG acceleration is to start implementing the fair and green economic transformation that PAGE aims at, by supporting national governments advance integrated policies that consider the synergies and trade-offs between priority issues. PAGE is ahead of the curve, in that respect – a model for collaboration, partnership and transformation.

Over the past few years, PAGE has become a close-knit community and the collaboration with DCO has enabled RCOs to benefit from the expertise of PAGE entities but also from the rich exchanges among peer economists.

In this context, since 2021, PAGE and DCO have held clinics, trainings and deep-dive sessions with UN Resident Coordinators’ Offices – particularly with our Economists – to support upskilling RCOs to convene and harness the expertise of their UNCTs to become fit for purpose in our support to an integrated approach to SDG Acceleration.

Looking ahead, how do you DCO’s engagement with PAGE?

Helena Fraser:

The world faces a rapidly changing geopolitical context and cascading crises, manifesting as major threats to SDG achievement. In terms of the climate agenda, we are now at a fork in the road. The continued collaboration between PAGE and DCO can help the UN system work more effectively with host governments to identify and take the path of fairer and greener economic transformation.

Our partnership with PAGE enables us to strengthen capacities at country level to enable better-informed decision-making processes for sustainable development. We need to continue refining the economic impact analysis of macroeconomic policies and investments on the SDGs, to catalyse positive spillover effects at the local, national and even regional levels.

Carmen Arguello:

A key highlight of DCO’s engagement with PAGE, is the dynamism of the collaboration and PAGE’s ability and willingness to adapt and innovate.

Therefore, based on lessons learned and following a country demand driven approach I anticipate that the PAGE-DCO collaboration will continue to support RCO Economists by fostering peer-to-peer learning and cooperation, enabling them to pull in relevant expertise from PAGE Agencies to provide integrated policy analysis capacities and resources to UN Country Teams, ultimately responding to key technical needs of ministries dealing with economic, planning and development, finance and investment policymaking to support the mobilization of scaled up financing for Sustainable Development.

I expect PAGE and DCO to continue to collaborate to provide RCOs a platform to facilitate discussions on green economic transformation issues, shifting the needle through an integrated approach to SDG implementation.

Learn more

Central to PAGE’s approach is the collaboration with UN Resident Coordinator Offices (UNRCOs) that are placed at the center of a coordinated UN System’s response to advance countries’ green economy pathways.

Over the past years, PAGE has built a partnership with the United Nations Development Coordination Office (UN DCO) to foster dialogue, strengthen capacities and facilitate exchange and peer-learning among countries and their respective UNCROs. This partnership allows for greater uptake and better design of green, circular and just transition policies and related finance mechanisms.

Leveraging the economic expertise of the UN System, PAGE and UN DCO offer targeted trainings and thematic dialogues that highlight key elements of green transitions and related tools and policy options.

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