UNITED NATIONS, June 29 (Xinhua) -- As the demand for United Nations peacekeeping continues to grow, the success of current and future operations will depend on the relationship between the world body and member states, senior officials with the organization said here on Wednesday.

    At the UN Security Council, senior officials called for a new partnership to ensure the requisite support and resources for UN peacekeeping operations.

    "UN peacekeeping is a global partnership," UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain Le Roy said during a meeting of the Security Council. "It brings together the legal and political authority of the Council with the essential personnel, materiel and finances of the member states."

    "It also draws together the (UN) Secretariat -- which must plan and manage the operations and the leaders and people of host countries, whose ongoing commitment to peace is perhaps the single most important factor," he said.

    It is this partnership, Le Roy said, that gives UN peacekeeping its strengths of legitimacy, burden-sharing, adaptability and reach.

    "When all the partners are strongly united behind a peacekeeping operation, it sends an unequivocal signal of international commitment which reinforces the authority of the Security Council and the credibility and effectiveness of any individual operation," he said.

    Le Roy added that, in the current global environment, financial constraints require a review of the basic models of peacekeeping. Costs, troop numbers, and capability requirements cannot all continue to rise indefinitely. And there is no sign, he said, that demand is decreasing.

    The UN Departments for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and for Field Support (DFS) have been working on a New Horizon initiative, to help form a new "Partnership Agenda" for peacekeeping.

    "The objective is to arrive at a set of achievable immediate medium- and long-term goals to help configure UN peacekeeping to better meet today's and tomorrow's challenges," he said.

    The initiative focuses on critical peacekeeping tasks and functions that require a renewed consensus; measures to improve mission design, resourcing and deployment; proposals on assessing and building the capacities needed for future peacekeeping; and a strategy to create a stronger, more flexible support system.

    The head of DFS, Susana Malcorra, noted that the past decade has seen several useful innovations, including the creation of Strategic Deployment Stocks that allow the UN to equip and supply missions more quickly than before, and the establishment of a peacekeeping reserve to allow for "commitment authority" of up to 50 million U.S. dollars in advance of a Security Council mandate.

    "But both these innovations are not calibrated to the current demands," she said. "Their ceilings remain static while the overall peacekeeping budgets have more than tripled."

    She echoed the need for a new agenda for partnership, stating that "more of the same" will not do.

    "We envisage a more nuanced, targeted approach -- with elements of mission support provided globally, others from a regional centre and others at the level of the individual mission. The current model of having a full support component for each and every mission needs to be re-visited," she said.

    She cited the need to explore options that will lead to, among others, "a lighter mission footprint," faster turnaround without compromising accountability and oversight, and greater use of local staff and local suppliers.

    United Nations peacekeeping operations are a crucial instrument at the disposal of the international community to advance peace and security. The role of UN peacekeeping was recognized in 1988, when United Nations peacekeeping forces received the Nobel Peace Prize.

    While not specifically envisaged in the UN Charter, the UN pioneered peacekeeping in 1948 with the establishment of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East. Since then, it has established a total of 63 operations, 50 of these since 1988. On Oct. 1, 2007, there were 17 active peacekeeping operations.

    Peacekeeping operations were deployed with the authorization of the Security Council and the consent of the host government and/or the main parties to the conflict.