A North Star for the UNDP

From her post at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Linda Maguire J91 F95 reconciles high-level strategy with an intimate understanding of tactical efficacy. As Assistant Administrator and Director of the Bureau for Management Services, she leads human resources, finance, procurement, security and other functions for 23,000 personnel across 170 duty stations and has a clear task: to help optimize efficiency within UNDP and among the United Nations’ numerous agencies and duty stations. 

Headquartered in New York, UNDP provides the operational backbone that makes the organization’s work at the country level possible. Leading the bureau, Maguire strives to improve efficiency across the organization. Currently UNDP spends 92 cents of every dollar on programs as opposed to bureaucracy and staffing. 

“I think there are a lot of opportunities for efficiency and ensuring that taxpayers are getting the most out of their precious dollars for development,” she said. 

Simultaneously, she strives to do so while maintaining excellent standards of quality and security. 

“I have a sense of responsibility to our team members in the field – for their security, their well being and ensuring that they, our biggest asset, can deliver on the development promise,” said Maguire. “Every day, I constantly try to connect the work we do to the relevance at the country level. That’s my north star.”

A School with Mystique

Maguire’s path into international affairs took unexpected turns. Growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, she always saw a particular allure to international careers. As an undergraduate at Tufts, she studied international relations with a French minor and spent a semester abroad in Paris. As she began to plot her next step, she became curious about Fletcher’s offerings. 

“When I was at Tufts, Fletcher had this mystique to it,” she said. “The future diplomats, lawyers and business leaders of the world were studying and traversing the Hall of Flags. As undergraduates, we had this healthy sense of respect for the reputation and gravitas of the school.”

Work as a paralegal in the appeals bureau of the New York County district attorney’s office led her to apply to law school, but on a lark she submitted an application to Fletcher as well. She’d all but committed to a JD program when she got her acceptance letter to the MALD program. 

“It was everything I was hoping for and more,” said Maguire. “I studied law because I wanted to marry the international desire that I had with the legal interest and experience that I had from the district attorney’s office.”

Exploring Careers in International Law

As a Fletcher student, Maguire dove into classes that examined questions of the law. She became a devotee of professors Alfred Rubin and Hurst Hannum. 

“The two of them embodied very different perspectives,” Maguire said. “One was a legal positivist and one focused on the criticality of human rights.” 

“I think that back and forth was very enriching and helped me understand the gamut of possibilities in an international legal career: you could go into the U.N., human rights law, governance issues, academia, international private law or international public law…and the list goes on.”

To begin exploring these options, she spent the summer between her first and second year in Geneva, working with an international NGO that specialized in human rights advocacy and law. Interfacing with the U.N. in this role got her to consider career options working in multilateral organizations. She dove deeper after graduating and traveled to Cote d’Ivoire to work for the National Democratic Institute and provide support with the 1995 elections. There, she directly encountered her future employer: the UNDP. 

“I was overwhelmed by the complexity and the heaviness of the institution that the local UNDP office represented,” said Maguire. “I didn’t yet appreciate the member state aspect of it: the fact that it is a member state driven and defined organization.”

Fletcher Prepares for the United Nations

Reflecting upon her work today, Maguire points to key lessons from Fletcher in preparing her to helm the bureau. Professor Rubin assigned large amounts of reading, and students banded together to study it. 

“We formed a study group of four women students,” she said. “We parceled out the readings, and then we would get together and discuss them. If any of us were called on in class, we might not have read the piece, but we would have read the brief that our colleague had prepared.” 

“That taught me to process an incredible amount of information, which you have to do in the U.N. Whether you work in the Secretariat or with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, you're bombarded with information. You have to be able to sift through it quickly and figure out what the salient points are,” she added. 

In addition to management and mentorship, Maguire finds solving complex, multidimensional problems to be highly rewarding work. 

“On a daily basis, a number of conundrums and sticky cases that couldn't be solved come across my desk. I like that: getting a challenge, working the problem and asking, ‘What are the different parts of it and what's the strategy we have to put in place. Let's think about the political dynamics and our long game.’”

“I really like that element of the job,” she added. “Being the head of a bureau, you have quite a bit of leeway to solve those problems and to set in motion a strategy that resolves them.” 

Learn more about Fletcher’s Global Governance and International Organizations field of study.