Solving tough MUN problems: a 3-Step approach
Unusual starting countries
Many delegates worry about the wrong things when trying to solve problems for their MUN committee.
Delegates might be worried that their delegate doesn’t have an important role to play in their committee. For example you could be:
Tuvalu in the General Assembly
Guatemala in a Disarmament committee
Delegates might also worry that their country doesn’t have the good history on a topic. You could end up being:
North Korea in a Human Rights Committee
Sometimes its something where your delegation finds themselves in a situation where things are a bit more complicated, your position on a topic isn’t as clear-cut and a bit more nuance needed in your problem-solving approach.
The secret advantage
In all of these situations, you can actually see it as an advantage! You find yourself in a situation where you actually can go against the grain from the rest of your committee, you can be a voice that advocates for different solutions and can shed light on unconsidered aspects of your committee.
Remember, the Dais doesn’t give awards to delegates based on who gets their resolution passed - they want Delegates who are being creative and are stimulating an interesting discussion on the topic. In the case where you have a small country, you don’t have as much public policy that you may need to adhere to - so you can take whatever position might be best for you and advocate from that angle. For controversial or nuanced countries, you can choose to take an opposing position to many of the Resolutions that are suggested - you can be the delegate challenging the proposed solutions which is never a bad thing.
Keeping things simple, a 3-step approach
Even if you have an unusual country, always make sure that you stick to some fundamentals. MUN delegates aren’t expected to be professional diplomats, and so the MUN problem-solving approach does allow for some leniency. Despite all this, you can still follow the classic committee prep process.
This means that you want to:
Step 1 - Read the Background Guide
No matter what - ALWAYS start with the Background Guide. You can still use the key statistics and prompts that are brought up in your Background guide, you just need to interpret them in a different way.
You can check out our Background Guide lesson here for more information: (Coming Soon!)
Step 2 - Research your Country
If you are representing a smaller country, you still want to get some basic fact about your country/. But you’ll really be wanting to focus your effort on researching past solutions, why they failed and what you might be able to do differently. In general, you wont need to conduct as much research and can just focus more on the problem solving.
If your country is one where your position might be more controversial, you’ll want to take some extra time pulling out important facts to make sure that you can back your solutions up and challenge existing solutions as much as possible. Also spend more time looking up what other delegates might end up considering for solutions and try find statistics that may support why
Step 3 - Think up your solutions
If you’re representing a smaller country, you can afford to be a bit more broad with both your research approach and with your solutions. You can pick solutions that other countries might not be able to use, you can try to think up broad frameworks that would then be useful for other countries more specific solutions to fit into. With the extra time you have for this stage, you want to make sure that your solutions are now extra creative and extra effective!
If your country is one where you’re a bit more against the grain, then you’ll either have a set policy that you can follow through with, if not. Just make a Resolution that provides minimal changes to existing frameworks and even try put clauses in place that might remove or reduce the impact of existing protections if you think its possible.
You’ll want to moderate your solutions somewhat as you’ll still need delegates to form a Bloc and will still want to Sponsor a Resolution. As long as you can show a balance between teamwork and maintaining accountability in your committee, then you’ll be doing your job well!
Conclusion - your role as a representative
In the end, Model UN conferences are about helping delegates to learn the essentials of diplomacy. Sometimes that means that you’ll have to represent a position that may not be yours, but you still need to do your best to put it in as positive a light as possible and try to get other people to understand the potential merits of it. If you’re able to do that and stand out a little bit by doing it, then you’ll be putting yourself in a very strong position in your Committee!
