Adapting to Different Committee Types
How chairing differs across General Assembly, Security Council, crisis committees, and specialized agencies, and the skills you need to adjust your approach.
Chairing the General Assembly
General Assembly committees are the most common format and present the chair's greatest logistical challenge: managing 50-150 delegates who all want floor time. The speakers' list is your primary tool and your primary constraint. With 100 delegates at 90 seconds each, the full list takes over two hours — and that is just opening speeches.
The key adaptation is aggressive pacing. Shorten speaking times after the first round. Use moderated caucuses with tight per-speaker limits (45-60 seconds) to move debate faster. Set hard deadlines for working papers and enforce them. In a large GA committee, if you are not slightly ahead of schedule, you are behind.
Bloc management becomes critical. With 100+ delegates, you cannot track individuals as closely as in a small committee. Instead, track bloc dynamics: the EU is cohesive, the G77 is fragmenting, the African Group is being pulled between two working papers. Your job is to facilitate bloc-to-bloc negotiation, not delegate-to-delegate conversation.
